Alarm bells ring over education group set up in Denmark which has mushroomed into empire with companies in Cayman Islands

Charity fails to account for funding gap on aid

From The Guardian, London, July 8th, 1993

Ian Katz and Tom Sharratt report on the mysterious finances of a multi-million-pound organisation which runs charitable foundations, controversial aid projects, and owns offshore companies and plantations.

A BRITISH third world aid charity which sells more than £1 million of used clothes a year was last night being Investigated by the Charity Commission amid allegations that It has been donating thousands to a bogus organisation.

Following a Guardian investigation, the charity watchdog said it would raise with Humana’s trustees what it believed were “non-charitable fund-raising aspects” of its operation.     Michael Meacher, Labour’s spokesman on cooperation and development, said last night he would raise the matter in ParIiament.    In a written question he asked why It had been allowed to operate in Britain since 1987 despite its sister organisations being banned from collecting in several European cities .

Humana, which collects used clothes and resells them, says it has donated more than £50,000 to the International Emergency Centre in Belgium.    But Guardian inquiries established that aid officials there had not heard of the centre, and no organlsation by that name is registered there.

Questions have been raised over the charity’s apparently commercial nature. In 1990, the last year for which It has submitted full accounts, it donated under 10 per cent of turnover to aid projects. Oxfam says it donates around half the turnover of its second hand clothes shops to charitable projects and approximately 20 per cent of the money it receives from sales to traders.

Humana, which has seven used clothes shops In London and Manchester, is the name used In non-Scandinavian countries for the Danish third world charity, Development Aid from People to People (DAPP). It Is linked to Tvind, a Danish-based educational organisation.

Attempts to trace the flow of money through the organisation quickly become swamped In a labyrinthine network of offshore companies, charitable foundations and properties.   The charity owns offshore companies on the Channel Islands and the Cayman Islands, fruit plantations In the Caribbean and at least one shipping company.

Humana also produces only the sketchiest literature on the third world development projects It backs. “I have never In my life come across a charity that couldn’t swamp your door with a thousand pieces of paper about what they do,” says Richard Lugg, a highway enforcement officer at Hounslow council who has monitored the charity since it began operating in the west London borough In 1987.

Supposedly autonomous national organisations raise funds In all the Scandinavian countries as well as Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and France under the umbrella of a federation established in 1991.

Control of the Humana/DAPP empire Is exercised by Tvind, an educational organisation founded in Denmark by a group of left wing teachers In the early seventies. The teachers, led by the charismatic Mogens Amdi Petersen, built a string of “progressive” boarding schools which specialised In taming troublesome children and emphasised a pro-third world outlook.

The organisation owns more than 40 schools in Denmark along with others in Norway, the US and Britain. In Denmark the government pays a large proportion of the salaries for the 600 or so Tvind teachers. Most of them hand over the money to a “general fund”.

During the early 1980s Tvind established two charitable foundations, Common Ownership Fund and Estate. Between 1983 and 1987 around £7 million was transferred from the general fund to the foundations to buy properties for the Tvind schools, as well as plantations In St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Grand Cayman and Belize.

Through a third foundation, Thomas Brocklebank, Tvind also acquired B&B Shipping. Its address – P0 Box 103, Bodden Town, Grand Cayman – was the same as those given for at least two other Tvind firms. In 1987 Tvind’s total capital was estimated at around £31 million.

DAPP, also known as UFF, was established as the movement’s charitable wing in the late 1970s. Volunteers from Tvind schools, many with problem backgrounds would work for periods In third world countries. Money for projects would be raised by collecting and selling unwanted clothing. The charity concentrated Its efforts on the socialist states of Angola, Zambia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

According to Paul Jorgenson, chairman of DAPP and believed to be second In command of the Tvind empire, the best clothes – around 12-15 per cent – are sold in its shops, around half sold In African countries, 30 per cent sold to rag traders and 10 per cent given away. Humana/ DAPP income from the sale of clothes was supplemented with large grants from the Swedish Government (approximately £1 million per year) and from the European Community.

First doubts about Humana/DAPP’s operations surfaced in the mid-1980s. Critics claimed DAPP’s cheap clothing sales was killing domestic textiles industries and pointed to very low wages paid to workers on Tvind’s plantations in Belize and St Lucia. On St Lucia a wages dispute on a Tvind plantatlon led to a violent strike while the organisation was expelled from nearby St Vincent.

A 1986 report commissioned by the EC criticised the organisation for depending too heavily on inexperienced volunteers and failing to employ project workers In host nations, The EC has stopped its grant to the organisation.

Last year another report prepared for the Swedish government found that only 2 per cent of money raised by DAPP/UFF In Sweden found its way to recipients in third world countries. The report prompted a block on Swedish government funding for DAPP.

In Belgium the official charity registry, the Centre for Social Documentation and Coordination, advised Brussels communes not to allow the installation of Humana collection boxes. Similar bans are In force In the Norwegian cities of Oslo and Bergen and the Norwegian government has stopped funding the Travelling High School, a branch of the Tvind movement. The Dutch government has ordered an investigation but the Centraal Bureau Fondsenwerving (CBF), the country’s equivalent to the Charity Commission, complains that DAPP headquarters have failed to reply to its Inquiries.

The names of many of Tvind’s founders appear repeatedly as shareholders of offshore companies. In Jersey, Tvind owns a company, Cedex Pac Ltd, which describes itself as a “secondhand general outfitters and tailors”. The 1991 records show as shareholders a Thomas Vaeth, a Svend Sorenson and a Josephus Hermanus Maria Nagel. All three are listed among the names of the hundred teachers who helped found Tvind. The address of Mr. Vaeth and Mr. Sorenson Is registered as P0 Box 103, Bodden Town, Grand Cayman.

The name of the company was changed from Goliath Services Limited to Cedex Pac following a meeting of share holders in Bodden Town, Grand Cayman, in July 1990. It was to Goliath Services that Humana UK paid thousands of pounds In leasing charges for their collection boxes. Until this year Mr. Sorenson and Mr. Vaeth were also listed as director and secretary of Westpac Hamlin Limited, a company described as a “ship, yacht, boat owner/dealer” registered In Guernsey.

Mr Jorgenson says the “Cayman question” is part of a smear campaign against Tvind “There has never been any connection between UFF, DAPP or Humana with anything on Cayman.” Later he admitted that Tvind had owned property on the islands but claimed it had now been Sold.    B&B Shipping had also been sold, he said, and he did not know of any links with companies celled Cedex Pac and Westpac Hamlin.

Mr Lugg says of TvInd: “The radical dressing has become their formula for recruiting the youth but they just found there was a formula for making huge amounts of money without any effort. There’s a logic because once they’ve set up the machinery they can’t bring themselves to shut it down.”

Tomorrow: How British tax payers help fund Tvind schools

Costs’ take 92pc of UK income

From The Guardian, London, 8th July, 1993

By Ian Katz and Tom Sharratt

THE distinctive pine collection boxes began appearing in west London In 1987. The message stencilled on most seemed straightforward. “Clothes for people in the third world”.

In its charity registration Humana stated that it aimed to “advance education and to relieve poverty and relieve suffering where caused by famine, war, natural and man-made disasters anywhere in the world.”

Directors were listed as Jesper Wohlert, Steen Conradsen and Ellen Mueller. Since then the names at the bottom of Humana UK’s annual reports, always Danish, have changed regularly.    Mikala Gottlob. a founder member of the Danish Tvind educational organisation, Is currently chairman.   The charity’s registered address isThe Small School at Buxton. Norwich, one of two Tvind schools in Britain.

In Its first year the clothes collection and recycling operation made a loss. But by the end of 1988 the organisation had shown a £114.094 operating profit, £22,000 of which was donated to charitable projects. Humana’s turnover rose steadily: £520,626 in 1989, £702,891 in 1990, and a figure over £1 million for 1991, though full accounts have not yet been filed for the year.

The amounts donated to charitable projects did not rise quite so dramatically: £47.674, or approximately 6 per cent of the organisation’s income in 1989, £54.499 (8 per cent) in 1990 and a similar proportion in 1991 and 1992 according to Ms Gottlob.

She says the charity now has seven shops and around 500 collecting boxes in Britain but has been able to donate only a small proportion of its income because of high start-up costs.   “It takes some time to build up and actually get the value out of secondhand clothes.”

Humana’s reports to the Charity Commission for 1989 and 1990 show that donations were made to two projects, a TV company called All Europe Satellite Television and an organisatlon called the International Emergency Centre.

All Europe Satellite Television, established in 1986, broadcast programmes submitted by state broadcasting corporations of third world countries and DAPP information films from a Norwegian base via the French satellite. Utelsat, on the so called One World Channel.

The programme for October 11 1989 offers a taste of its output: 9.30 — Interview with Dr. Julius Nyerere, the former Tanzanian president. 9.45 — Speech by Dr. Julius Nyerere. Shutdown.   Humana UK donated more than £30,000 to the TV station in 1989 and 1990 and more In the following two years.   It stopped broadcasting last September because, according to Ms Gottlob, “we found that a lot of what One World Channel was doing was being done by other broadcasters.”

The regular and sizeable donations – £32,500 in 1989 and £38,493 in 1990 – made to the International Emergency Centre are less easy to trace.

According to Humana’s reports the centre is a Belgium-based organisation which Is “establishing a store of packages containing new clothes ready for distribution in emergency situations”.

No organisation of that name Is registered in Belgium and no voluntary aid official contacted had heard of it. Ms Gottlob. who was not sure she had heard of It herself, thought it might now be based in Holland. The Centraal Bureau Fonsenwerving (CBF), the Dutch equivalent of the Charity Commission, was not aware of it.

In 1990 DAPP gave an address at Holland Park, west London to a Swedish government investigation which proved to be an administrative address at which the company had been registered after the Swedish inquiry.   The contact number for the centre was the Cayman Islands telephone number used by the Tvind/DAPP company Tropical Produce Ltd.

In 1989 Richard Lugg, a Hounslow council officer, found that the charity was paying thousands of pounds to lease containers from Goliath Services, a Jersey-registered company whose shareholders were linked with the Tvind/DAPP organisation.

The charity was also paying almost £10,000 a year to lease vehicles from Resources Recycling, registered at the same London address as Humana. At the end of last year the charity was told to remove its boxes from public footpaths In the west London borough.

Stickers have recently appeared on Humana collection boxes listing four destinations for money raised in 1992 including child aid programmes In St. Lucia, Zambia, Angola and Guinea Bissau, a tree planting project in Angola and One World Channel, but no accounts showing these donations have yet been submitted.

Additional reporting by Julie Wolf and GiseIa Graf.

Charity schools ‘brainwashed staff’

From The Guardian, London, 9th July 1993

By Ian Katz, Tom Sharratt and David Ward

A DANISH educational organisation which runs two schools In Britain and recruits British teachers and volunteer workers, has been accused of using cult techniques and brainwashing its staff

Tvind, which runs more than 40 boarding schools in Denmark, and others in Norway and the US, specialises in taming problem children, and emphasises a communal lifestyle and pro-third World outlook. Students and teachers work to raise money for the organisation’s charity Development Aid from People to People (Dapp), known In non-Scandinavian countries as Humana.

The British branch of Humana is at present being investigated by the Charity Commission following a Guardian investigation which revealed that the charity had been donating thousands of pounds to a bogus emergency aid organlsation

Questions have also been raised in a number of European countries over how charitable funds are transferred through Tvind’s network of offshore companies and charitable trusts centred round Its financial base in the Cayman Islands.

Tvind’s two schools in Britain, the Small School at Red House, in Norwich, and the Small School at Winestead Hall, in Hull, take children from problem backgrounds referred by local authorities.

According to Anne Ellingsen, a former Tvind pupil who has founded a group to campaign against Tvind in Norway, the organisation ‘is not a religious sect but a sect which officially doesn’t have any ideology at all’.

Tvind was founded in the late 1970s by a group of radical left wing teachers who decided to pool their wages and live a communal lifestyle.

Subsidised with grants from the Danish government it grew rapidly, establishing a giant headquarters campus in the Danish town of Ulfborg, where mature students built the world’s largest electricity generating windmill, which has since become the symbol of the organisation.

The Tvind schools operate a strict regime, requiring students to adhere to a “programme”.

Emphasis is placed on practical teaching, outdoor activities and travel.

In addition to schools the organisation has a university, a school for training Dapp/Humana volunteers, and a teacher training college.

Two Oxfam officials who visited the Ulfborg campus with a view to running a joint programme with Dapp were at first impressed with the vigour and application of the Tvind teachers, but began to have doubts. In an internal report to the charity one of them wrote: “We both began to question whether we had not been ‘brainwashed’. We suddenly found that things we had accepted with admiration before began to have dubious or sinister undertones.

Through regular advertisements in newspapers, including the Guardian, Tvind solicits Britons for the four-year course at its Necessary Teacher Training College. which is followed by a year teaching in a Dapp school in Africa.

Its schools, describes as “probably the most exciting boarding schools in Europe” are also advertised in Humana’s seven British second-hand clothes stores.

Allegations that the organisation has the characteristics of a cult are echoed by a number of Britons who replied to Tvind ads.    Sarah Fradgley, a 22-year old graduate who volunteered to work at a Dapp/Tvind giant flea market in Stockholm returned to Britain disillusioned.

“The whole work ethic of the Danes there was quite totalitarian, almost fascist”

A 21-year-old man who attended an introductory week end at the Small School at Red House was unnerved by the isolated location of the Norwich school and one he visited in Ulfborg.

“Brainwashing is a very fair description of what goes on. With people living in groups so close together seven days a week and isolated from all other social contact, it is a very insular sort of existence; their ideas arid beliefs must slowly become identical.”

‘They would put capitalist factory owners to shame’

From The Guardian, London, 9th July 1993

By Ian Katz, Tom Sharratt and David Ward

PEARSE Cooke saw the advert In the Guardian in March last year. “Are you Interested in a year’s challenging experience in educating young people in an unusual residential school in England or Denmark?”

At 29, having just spent two years working as a care assistant with disabled children, the idea sounded appealing. In July he attended a weekend introductory course at the Red House School in Norwich and liked what he saw.

“They showed us around the school and spoke in detail about their aims. They were espousing leftwing views similar to my own so I thought that’s pretty cool, I’m up for that.”

He was offered and took a position at the Juelsminde Friskole on the coast of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula. Most of the 40-odd pupils, all boarders had been placed there by social services departments and the eight teachers were Danes.

At £100 a month after tax, the pay was low but Mr Cooke was puzzled when he received his first pay slip to find instead of the 120 hours he estimated he worked that month, it showed just 18 – but at a much higher pay rate of about £20 an hour. “I raised it and they just gave me some piffle-paffle. Then I found out they did it like that to satisfy the Danish government they paid the minimum wage.”

Although impressed with the school’s facilities, he became increasingly uncomfortable about a number of other aspects of life there. All the maintenance and cleaning was done by teachers and pupils, who were often offered cash or other incentives to do extra work. “I thought to myself ‘my God, the health and safety would have a field day here’,” he recalls. Then there was the curious task assigned to him on Wednesday mornings; burning two sacks of paperwork on a nearby beach.” A lot of them looked like old bank statements.”

But pupils and teachers were constantly told their work was helping the poor in Africa and South America, and during regular “charIty weeks” they worked hard to meet specified DAPP/Humana fundraising targets.

An unwritten rule was that students and teachers should not read newspapers. But after returning from his Christmas holiday, a mature student from a nearby Tvind school told him of reports that only a tiny proportion of DAPP/Humana income went to charitable causes.

“I began to ask about how much was going to the Third World and they would say all of it bar administration costs.”

Another source of irritation was a drinking ban on staff even off school premises. Once a senior teacher caught him drinking in a Juelsminde bar and ordered him back to the school. Then in May, the school found he and some mature students had been drinking beer in his room. The beer had been stolen by a pupil from a supermarket, but Mr Cooke insists he did riot know that.

He was called before senior teachers and questioned at length. “They used police-type tactics, three of them interrogating me at once. They were very enthusiastic that I should grass on anyone.” When he refused to name anyone else involved he was asked to leave. “I moved to Aarhus and met two pupils who told me the headmaster had announced that anyone who spoke to me or acknowledged me would be expelled.” Another staff member told him he too had been banned from talking to him.

In retrospect, Mr Cooke believes the school had many characteristics of a cult. Volunteers were constantly encouraged to join the four-year Necessary Teacher Training College, after which they were expected to pledge 70 per cent of their earnings to the “joint economy”.

Much emphasis was placed on symbols of the Tvind organisation, such as the great windmill at Ulfborg. Entertainment at the weekly coffee and music nights came strictly from the Tvind song book and there was the rationing of information that is a familar feature of many cults.  “A teacher once said to another volunteer ‘The longer you are in the organisation, the more you will find out.’ I thought ‘About what —where the money goes?’.”

Now back in Britain, Mr Cooke is establishing an anti Tvind organisation similar to those In Norway and Denmark. “It’s not political, it’s not religious, it’s financial.   These people would put capitalist factory owners to shame”

Councils continue sending pupils

From The Guardian, London, 9th July 1993

By Ian Katz, Tom Sharratt and David Ward

LOCAL councils in Britain are continuing to send children with severe emotional and behavioural problems to a school in Norfolk despite warnings issued by the then Department of Education and Science three years ago.

DES officials wrote to social services departments to express concern about safety, health, hygiene and pupil supervision. Red House, at Buxton, near Norwich, and Winestead Hall, near Hull, are both owned by Tvind.

Red House wrote to all placing authorities to reply to the complaints, and reduced pupil numbers.   In 1991 a report by school inspectors found that there had been significant improvement and progress, but stressed that more time needed to be devoted to developing the curriculum.

Although Red House and Winestead Hall are both registered with the Department for Education, neither is on its approved list. Fees charged are £40,000 per pupil per year. The 1989 balance sheet shows that Red House wade a profit of more than £390,000. Most teachers return their earnings into a “common economy”.

Mikala Gottlob, a founder member of Tvind who now works at the Norfolk school, said yesterday profits had been used to establish the school on Humberside.    She said about half of Red House’s 45 pupils had been referred by at least 12 London boroughs.    The rest came from local councils south of a line from Birmingham to the Wash.

Winestead Hall, which opened in 1989 and specialises in adventure trips on its own brigantine, is no longer used by Humberside county council. “Over four years, we have had two brief placements at Winestead Hall,” said Robert Lake, the county’s director of social services. “It is not my intention to make any more.”

Neighbouring Lincolnshire does not send pupils to Winestead Hall. The school has recently been inspected by Humberside and is likely to be formally registered with the county, despite reservations about staffing ratios and long hours worked, the absence of domestic staff, the lack of a telephone for pupils’ use, and arrangements for the independent visitors required by the Children Act

Ms Gottlob said staff had one night off per week and one weekend off per month: “We don’t believe in shift work when dealing with children.”

A 40-page booklet which lays out detailed guidelines for the treatment of pupils at both schools repeatedly refers to “the programme”.   One of the schools’ four main rules is that students “must take an active part in the programme”.

The booklet also specifies which sanctions and rewards may be used. Pupils caught damaging property are made to repair the item themselves or pay. Pupils who carry out extra tasks may be rewarded with items such as chocolate, or may be taken out for dinner with a member of staff:

All students and teachers at the schools traditionally go skiing during the Christmas holiday, staying in a hotel In Norway owned by the organisation.

Red House’s own survey Indicates that of 111 pupils who passed through the school in seven years, 52 per cent are “doing well”. Lee Pearson, who worked for a year as a £55-a-month volunteer at Winestead Hall said yesterday: “They take the kids no one else will take and try to help them.”

Former Tvind pupil tells of falling foul of ‘the programme’ after a party time of television and sweets

From The Guardian, London, 9th July 1993

By Ian Katz, Tom Sharratt and David Ward

NAOMI Edwards was 17 in the summer of 1992 when her mother returned to their Salford home with a poster from the Humana shop in Manchester.

It shows photographs of teenagers participating in sporting and educational activities, and the text explained that Tvind started more than 21 years ago with travelling courses, especially to Third World countries.

Naomi, who describes her self as rebellious, claims she did not get an education In conventional schools, so she was attracted to the kind of schooling that Tvind seemed to offer, and was interested in a school at Juelsminde, on the coast of the Jutland

Eventually Naomi and a friend, Louise Smith, also l7, raised the £500 they needed and enrolled at the Juelsminde school, to start on June 6 last year.

“We had two days to roam the school and had loads of good treatment from teachers, like taking us to swim in the sea. They would try to be like friends. Then they would take us into a room with a telly and sweets, like party time.

Naomi claims other children told her that pupils were expected to conform to something called the programme, and alleges that children would be beaten if they failed to follow It.

Naomi also recalls that black youngsters from southern Africa were housed in the school’s domestic block. “They were supposed to be getting an education, but it was all cooking and cleaning.”

Before the school term was due to start the two girls decided to get out, but they were caught. Naomi says they were accused of not following the programme. She claims she was beaten by the head and another woman teacher.

The two girls were eventually allowed to leave, and returned home.