The used clothing trophy

Berlingske Tidende, August 24th 2002

As the arrested Tvind founder Mogens Amdi Petersen is heading home top be tried for embezzlement, Tvind’s international trade is running as ever. Sunday Berlingske can report today how Tvind, assumingly helping the poor of the third world, is defrauding people, acting in good faith by dropping their used clothes into Tvind’s collection bins, all over Europe. A Network of secret companies, hidden in the Netherlands, Ireland and in the British tax haven Jersey, Tvind has been collecting millions out of the sale of used clothing for at least the last ten years.

By Michael Bjerre

AMSTERDAM

[Note: as this article has been translated from Danish to German, then to English, some of the quotes may not be literal.]

The small man with the graying hair points determinedly toward the main entrance:

“I have nothing to tell”, he snares.

The man’s name is Flemming Gustaffson and has been for many years one of Tvind’s leading businessmen. The 59-year-old Dane stands behind the main entrance to the office in the grey and drab building, next to a lively main road in the provincial town of Maarsen, south-east of Amsterdam.

It is rather difficult to imagine that this building should be the location for one of Tvind’s largest and shyest businesses in Europe.

From this location Tvind secretly betrayed for at least ten years all the good willing Europeans who thought the surplus of selling the clothes donated to Tvind would help the poor in the Third World, as Tvind promised. Instead Tvind channeled all the money through their secret companies into their own accounts.

Tvind even doesn’t make a distinction in this practice with their offices. Only a handwritten note gives away that the company “Conmore” resides in this building in the sleepy Dutch province.

Flemming Gustaffson’s limited hospitality might have something to do with him playing a central part in Tvind’s big used clothing cup.

“Is there anything sensible to light going on in the companies you’re involved with”, Sunday Berlingske asks while on the way back outside.

“There is something wrong with the newspapers in Denmark”, Flemming Gustaffson answers sharply and adds: “I want you to leave this office. NOW!”

Now there may be several reasons for Flemming Gustaffson to refuse to share details about his daily work with the public.

First, Tvind has never before been under such a high pressure, becoming clear lately, as the founder Mogens Amdi Petersen, after a half year in the rough American jails, yielded and accepted to return home to Denmark. Here he and seven other Tvind leaders are accused of embezzlement and tax fraud for 75 million Danish crowns.

Secondly, Flemming Gustaffson himself is accused of a white-collar-crime in Belgium. He and seven other Tvind leaders are facing a trial for money laundering from about 23 million Danish crowns, the details being undisclosed by the Belgian police.

Thirdly, there is questioning for Tvind’s trading companies that Flemming Gustaffson would like to avoid. Noticing how the companies were the gear-wheels in an extremely clever system of deceiving the donators of the used clothes and the poor in the Third World who were to profit, Flemming Gustaffson’s rejection makes sense. Thus Sunday Berlingske can reveal what up till recently used to be one of Tvind’s largest frauds.

The fraud is based on the fact, that Tvind’s humanitarian organizations in Western Europe – UFF and Humana – only receive a fraction of the profit from the sale of the clothes deposited in their collection bins.

Instead, they sell them officially to a Tvind company in Holland, which in turn sells them to Tvind’s companies, for example in the British tax haven of Jersey, earning the profit by selling them at far higher prices in Eastern Europe.

This way the largest part of the profits can be collected in Tvind’s own accounts and not into the accounts of UFF or Humana, which in turn have far less to give to the Third World as might be achieved originally.

In order to understand the structure and the background of Tvind’s economic ‘used-clothes-laundering’ we have to turn back the time to a historic date. It is November 9th, 1989; the iron curtain separating Europe falls.

The party in Berlin seems to never end. Champagne corks pop everywhere, people saluting each other and a wave of happiness and relieve rolls over the European continent.

But for some the new time is something else than just a party. In some distance to the events, Tvind’s supreme leaders, led by Mogens Amdi Petersen, begin to make new plans for their business. They consider Eastern Europe to be a whole new market to wash money into their tanks, and so Amdi, shortly after the iron curtain fell, accepted the plan for a large campaign, as sources close to the leaders for some years, explain.

Amdi’s plans are to erect an international business empire to secure Tvind’s further expansion, at some time in the 80’s he already came up with a plan for something he called “money-earning activity”.

The pedagogic project, started out in the 70’s as a revolutionary movement with educational trips in rumbling busses and almost-sinking ships, was now to use the methods of capitalism to reach their goal.

Eastern Europe fitted perfectly for that strategy. These countries are an extremely good market for a good with which Tvind’s storage facilities are almost overflowing with – used winter clothing.

In 1989 Tvind had been collecting used clothing in some European countries for a couple of years already. In Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland they collected under the name “Ulandshælp fra Folk til Folk” (UFF) [Development Aid from People to People]. In England, Holland, Belgium, Germany and Austria they resided as ‘Humana People to People’.

But a substantial part of the used clothing people dropped into the yellow and green collection bins were warm winter clothes, which for obvious reasons were unsuitable for use in Africa.

Unlike Africa, Eastern Europe is perfect for the sale of these clothes. As always, whenever Tvind is under way with great plans, the so-called ‘distribution group’ hunts for possible keynote themes in the Teacher’s Group.

This ‘distribution group’ is made up of Mogens Amdi Petersen and his girlfriend Kristen Larsen, and shortly after, as Tvind-informants report; they had selected a number of trustworthy employees, who had proven well in business before, for the job at hand.

One of those is Flemming Gustaffson.

On September 3rd, 1992 Flemming Gustaffson founded the company ‘E.C. Trading’ in Holland. Gustaffson is the only shareholder of the company. Later all shares are taken over by a Kirsten Kristiansen. And later yet, they are taken over by Poul Laurits Jørgensen.

The changing of the stockholders is only trying to conceal the relations to Tvind, as several Tvind-informants report for Sunday Berlingske.

Flemming Gustaffson is not the only one of the three who has been a long-time-member of the Teachers Group. Kirsten Kristiansen has been with Tvind for 30 years, at first as a teacher for the traveling folk high school, later as coordinator for the container transports of the used clothes.

Poul Laurits Jørgensen – inside Tvind called ‘Poul junior’ as not to be confused with the Tvind spokesman Poul Jørgensen – has been with Tvind for 20 years, most of the time with UFF.

Even though E.C. Trading is a Tvind company, there is a reason for Tvind to keep this a secret. E.C. Trading’s main task is to buy used clothing collected by UFF and Humana all over Western Europe.

By cooperating closely, there is the opportunity to channel away a great part of the funds collected by the humanitarian national sections of UFF and Humana supposed to be distributed to Tvind’s projects in the Third World.

And this is exactly what’s happening.

E.C. Trading is, as mentioned before, just a stopover in Tvind’s great eastern European fraud. E.C. Trading sells the larger part – about 85 percent – to five other Tvind companies, four of them hidden in Jersey, the British tax haven.

Low Taxes are not the only advantage of the Jersey addresses. Here you can hide everything from key numbers to staff members, as there is no need to supply that information to the authorities.

Sunday Berlingske came into possession of documents about those four companies – Holland House, Holland Trading, Holland Enterprise and World Wide Suppliers.

Member of the board of directors of all these companies is Birgitte Larsen. She is not just somebody. For years she played a central part in leading the Tvind economy. From the Tvind headquarters at Grindsted she looked after the private economy, the issuing of tax cards and the pocket money for all the members of the Teachers Group, who all had signed up for the “mutual economy”.

But now it is her job to channel the profits from the Jersey companies to the secret accounts. This doesn’t happen physically on the green British Island, but from an equally secret Tvind office located on Mill Lane 28 in the tax haven of Gibraltar.

As the day-by-day leader of Tvind’s tax haven companies Birgitte Larsen soon gets many other tasks. Tvind’s decision to venture into the eastern European market proofs to be a great success.

East European people are going crazy for the modern western-style clothes. Unlike when they had to spend a month’s paycheck to buy some used Levi’s at the black market, they can now buy used brand clothing for a reasonable price.

The buyers let the Jersey phones ring all day long. Actually though the calls were rerouted by answering machines to E.C. Trading in Holland, and in their Amsterdam office the order forms are filled out, too, as former Tvind workers point out to Sunday Berlingske. The demand is so high that E.C. Trading sometimes almost can’t satisfy it. In a steady stream trucks filled with used clothing pull away from one of the 37 loading ramps in the 200 meter long building housing the sorting facility heading toward Eastern Europe.

The same thing happens in England, Belgium, Germany, and Sweden and wherever else in Europe Tvind is collecting clothes. E.C. Trading even picks up clothing from UFF’s large sorting facility in Ballerup near Copenhagen and in Århus, as several hundred freight bills possessed by Sunday Berlingske prove.

In 1997 Tvind directed over 25,000 tons of used clothing through E.C. Trading and the Jersey Companies. With an average load of 17 tons this equals 1,500 trucks stuffed with used clothing heading from Western to Eastern Europe.

Other key figures reveal how gigantic the business with Eastern Europe for the Teacher’s Group becomes.

The E.C. Trading turnover rises strikingly in the mid-90’s.Up from 17.2 million Dutch Guilders [about 60 million Danish Crowns] in 1995 to 35.5 million Guilders [about 130 million Danish Crowns] in 1998. Tvind’s moneymaking machine ran smoothly. But the Hungarian police had a watchful eye on the transports with used clothing from the west.

The Hungarian customs officers noticed that the Tvind-trucks were showing false customs forms. There was far more clothing loaded on the trucks than accounted for in the customs forms.

Thus in the fall of 1999 the Hungarian customs police asked their Dutch colleagues to start an investigation on E.C. Trading.

In the Amsterdam offices of E.C Trading the employees were shocked as two police officers showed up to ask about the false customs forms, but the police left empty-handed. Now Tvind panics, as the police leaving empty-handed is no clue toward Tvind not being an active offender in the Hungarian matters, as a former employee states.

This former employee wishes not to reveal his identity as he has been involved in issuing the false customs forms for E.C. Trading.

“We sent out two different sets of customs forms. One of them showed the real amount, while the other showed a far smaller amount of the loaded clothes. In some cases, it only showed 10 percent of what was actually loaded on the truck”, the former employee states.

As Tvind sources tell, action was taken by Tvind members after the police had showed up at the Amsterdam offices to destroy all proofs for irregularities.

The sources interpretation is as follows:

On the same evening as the police had visited the offices one of the Tvind leaders went hastily through all the files with the customs forms at the E.C Trading office to make sure, that nothing can be traced back to the company. Afterwards one piece of paper after another disappears in the shredder.

Tvind also had gotten very active in Hungary. Some time before, Flemming Gustaffson had travelled to Hungary to set up a Tvind office for one of the Jersey companies, as the sale of used clothing is booming.

Now everything is done to find a way our of the country as fast as he can. Immediately a container is ordered in order to clear away the office within 24 hours. Furniture and computers are packed removed, and as the police appear at the office the only thing left is Flemming Gustaffson’s leased Mercedes.

The Dutch police are looking for Flemming Gustaffson, too. But he seems to have been swallowed by the ground.

According to the information available to Sunday Berlingske Flemming Gustaffson had fled to Kenya’s capital Nairobi, where he still has an address even while working in Holland again. Sunday Berlingske would have liked to hear Flemming Gustaffson’s own interpretation of the proceedings, but the request was being turned down as he didn’t wish to talk to the newspaper.

The police in Holland have not found any proofs for the customs forms fraud, and some months later, on May 23rd, 2000, E.C. Trading files bankruptcy.

So quietly the company tries to disappear from sight, explaining they were not able to get their feet back on the ground after the collapse of the trade with used clothes in Eastern Europe.

The appointed trustee, The Hague lawyer J.C. Rosenberg Polak, quickly realizes that this is not an ordinary bankruptcy. “Actually, I haven’t seen something like this before”, J.C. Rosenberg Polak states, who is specialized in bankruptcies.

At first, the lawyer thinks it is just a regular liquidation. But after receiving the hint that a sect like Danish school movement of the ‘70 owns the bankrupt company and all of their trade partners – UFF, Humana and the Jersey companies – he begins to wonder.

This model is great for everyone who wants to drain a company to channel away the assets.

While trying to reveal the trade relations between the companies, J.C. Rosenberg Polak finds a very suspicious pattern.

The debtors of E.C. Trading are the four Jersey companies and a fifth, registered in Ireland, Brichwood Trading.

At the same time, the annual statement of accounts shows that the five companies shortly before E.C. Trading’s bankruptcy had paid out a stock profit of 2 million dollars to their common holding company, Coriander Holding Ltd.

“The question is whether this is a coincident or the dividend had been paid consciously at the expense of the – practically – bankrupt company”, the suspicious receiver writes in a report on this matter, dated September 11th, 2000.

Therefore J.C. Rosenberg Polak asks for information about Coriander Holding, which Tvind also is behind at and is, according to Sunday Berlingske information, controlled by Mogens Amdi Peterson.

Even though J.C. Rosenberg Polak asks the Tvind director of the Jersey companies, Birgitte Larsen at Gibraltar, for information regarding the holding company again and again, he receives no answer. On other occasions, the receiver is being lied to.

“At first they denied that the bankrupt company was part of the Tvind companies. In a later phase among others the board of directors of some companies based on the Channel Islands [i.e. Jersey, ed.] confirmed the companies being part of the Tvind group. All seems to show that the bankrupt company [E.C. Trading, ed.] is part of the Tvind group”, J.C. Rosenberg Polak writes in the receiver’s report of this year May 7th.

The Matter is not finished yet. But after J.C. Rosenberg Polak threatened some of the Jersey companies with filing a lawsuit in Jersey, the Tvind people obviously got nervous and paid part of their debts to E.C. Trading.

“It seems they fear a lawsuit filed in Jersey. Because then it would become obvious in court, who is behind Coriander Holding”, J.C. Rosenberg Polak says.

Today, the receiver does not hold much for Tvind.

J. C. Rosenberg Polak: “I find it hard to see what their way of doing business has to do with humanitarian work. If they wanted to do good for the people in the Third World, they shouldn’t be selling their used clothes to their own companies, skimming off the biggest profit.”

The lawyer also shakes his head on the idea that Tvind set up a different company after E.C. Trading’s bankruptcy, Conmore, to keep up the fraud.

“This is always the problem with bankruptcies, the people can just continue with a different company”, J.C. Rosenberg Polak closes his statement.

ISOBRO is a union of 39 humanitarian organizations in Denmark. Members are among others the Fokekirkens Nødhjælp [People’s Church Emergency Aid], BØRNEfonden [the Children’s Fund] and UNICEF. ISOBRO reacts strongly on the revelation of Tvind’s economic laundering of used clothing.

ISOBRO’s main target is developing a high ethic standard for collections and donations. The union has therefore drawn up common ethic rules for this area.

“First of all, it is fantastic, Tvind holding some of the poorest humans on this world hostage in this kind of speculation” ISOBRO’s Chairman Stig Fog says.

“Secondly, the Danish authorities will have to become more conscious of their responsibility. It is insane that they free UFF/Humana from their duty to pay VAT, even though they seem not to stand on the proper side of the law.”

This week’s Friday, Coop Danmark A/S – the former FDB, operating among others SuperBrugsen, Kvickly and Fakta – announced Tvind would no longer be allowed to have their collection bins in front of their shops.

This was decided on as Tvind is operating so closed, it doesn’t fit Coop Danmark’s ideals of openness and dialogue. Stig Fog thinks the local authorities should follow this example.

“It would be peculiar if the Danish local authorities would continue to supply space for UFF’s collection bins after all the information becomes public”, Stig Fog declares.

The question of legality of Tvind’s economic arrangements has to be answered by others. For the time being, Tax and Customs authorities investigate, closely cooperating with the Bagmandspolitiet [backer’s police], if UFF/Humana has drained sales tax or turnover tax-free funds from Denmark illegally. Upon reading the information collected by Sunday Berlingske the public prosecutor Henning Thiesen declares:

“What in this context is happening in Holland and other countries will of course be included in our consideration.”

Orange Hill Sale

How it was negotiated

From the Vincentian, 29th March 1985

by special reporter

The Deed of Conveyance transferring approximately 8,500 acres of land at Orange Hill from Orange Hill Estates Limited to a new company known as Windward Properties Limited was registered at 2.25pm on Friday 22nd March 1985 at the Court House Registry.

The deed was signed by Cyril Barnard and Martin Barnard on behalf of Orange Hill Estates Limited, and was perused on their behalf by Barrister-at-Law Errol Layne

Dated 25th February 1985, the Deed was prepared on behalf of Windward Properties Limited by Barrister-at-Law Othniel Sylvester, who also witnessed the Barnard’s signatures.

According to the Deed, the property was sold for $5,337,600 EC ($2.1 million US).

The registration of the Deed of Conveyance took place three days after publication of the Government Gazette in which the Government gavce notice of its intention to acquire the same lands.

There has been widespread popular opposition to the sale.  All opposition pareties  -  the Labour Party, the United People’s Movement, and the Movement for National unity   -   have all called on government to prevent the sale of the Orange Hill Estate to the Danes.

The Vincentian has obtained the full details of the legal manoeuvres which have resulted in the transfer of 10 per cent of all arable land in St Vincent and the Grenadines into foreign hands without  government permission.

It appears that advantage was taken of certain loopholes in the law.  For example, of the seven signatures on the registration documents for Windward Properties Limited, not one is Vincentian.  yet according to the law, Windward Properties Limited is a Vincentian Company.

This is how it was done.   In the laws of St vincent and the Grenadines, a company must be formed by at least seven subscribers.   If one half or more than one half of the subscribers are unlicensed aliens, then the Company is an alien company.  But if more than one half of the subscribers are vincentians, then the Company bvecomes a Vincentian Company.  So if 7 people form a company and 4 of them are Vincentians  whilst 3 of them are unlicensed aliens, then the company is a Vincentian company.

An unlicensed alien is a foreigner who has not received a license from the government.  An unlicensed alien cannot own land in St Vincent and the Grenadines.   land can only be owned by a foreigner if the foreigner is granted an Aliens Land Holding Licence by the Cabinet.

However three unlicensed aliens can join with four Vincentians and form a CVompany.  The company so formed will be a Vincentian Company and so will not need an Aliens Land Holding Licence.

What happened was that four companies were formed between 18th and 19th February 1985.  All four companies were formed by Barrister-at-Law Othniel Sylvester and all had their office at orange Hill.

The four companies were: Rose Cottage Limited, Denver portland Limited, Blue Ridge Limited and ZBF Limited.

Each company was formed by three different unlicensed aliens believed to be Danes, and four Vincentian women employed in the legal chambers of Othniel Sylvester.

Each company was therefore a Vincentiuan company since the majority of subscribers were Vincentians.

Eachj company has an authorised share capital of $10,000.00divided into 1,000 shares of $10.00 each.

Eleven different unlicensed aliens are involved in the formation of the four companies:but the same four Vincentian women  -  a solicitors’s clerk, a secretary, and two typists  -   are the subscribers to all four companies.

Then on 20th February 1985, these four Vincentian companies got together with three unlicensed aliens  (who themselves were already members of those same four companies) and formed a fifth company called Windward Properties Limited.

In the Memorandum of Association of Windward Properties Limited, the first object for which the company was formed  is set out as follows:

“To acquire the whole or any part of the undertaking and assets of orange Hill Estates limited  and for that purpose to enter into and carry into effect with such (if any) modifications or alterations  as may be agreed upon an agreement which was made in the year 1984.”

The registered office of Windward Properties Limited is Orange Hill.

Windward properties Limited has an authorised share capital  of $1,000,000 divided into 10,000 shares of $100.00 each.

Being a Vincentian company, Windward Properties Limited did not need to obtain an Aliens Land Holding Licence to purchase Orange Hill.

Legal opinion is divided  as to whether the aliens have in fact beaten the system. The Vincentian is advised that it is possible for the Attorney General to challenge the whole manoeuvre in the law courts, by going behind the transactions to find out just where  the $5,337,600 came from, and to see whether the four Vincentian women actually control the majority share holding in the Company.

Some lawyers feel that government should acquire the shares held by the four Vincentians and so obtain  control of all the companies, including Windward properties Limited.  it is said that these legal mechanisms would be far cheaper than acquiring the lands from the aliens.

Sources close to the government say that the government is keeping all of its options open.

Calls have already been made for amendments to laws that would allow eleven aliens to join with four locals  and manage to avoid the provisions of the Aliens Land Holding Regulations Ordinance.

Man on CCJ selection body faces fraud rap

April 18, 2005

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad, CMC:

See complete article Jamaica Gleaner

THE CARIBBEAN Court of Justice (CCJ) was inaugurated on Saturday amid claims that a member of the Regional Judicial and Legal Services Commission, which is charged with appointing judges to the Court, had defrauded a Danish foundation of EC$5.2 million.

The Sunday Express newspaper reported that the foundation is suing Commissioner Othniel Sylvester, Q.C., to recover the money reportedly expended for the purchase of a parcel of land. It has also filed court action seeking to discipline the former temporary High Court judge.

The newspaper added that president of the CCJ, Michael De La Bastide, intends to launch an investigation into claims, which have sparked suggestions that Sylvester could end up before the very court, for which he is one of those charged for selecting judges.

BID TO BLOCK THE LAWSUIT

Sylvester, reportedly shied away from answering any questions relating to the pending lawsuit when approached by the Sunday Express at the CCJ launch in Trinidad, noting, “the position is once there is pending litigation one just can’t comment.”

Sylvester has made a bid to block the lawsuit, claiming abuse of process. He lost the first round in his bid but has appealed and that hearing comes up tomorrow in the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal in St Lucia.

Sylvester, a native of St Vincent and the Grenadines, was the former president of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States Bar Association and was appointed a member of the RJLSC in July 2003.

According to details of the pending court action which was filed in February 2004, a Danish private commercial foundation, Faellesje, claims that in July 1984 it entered into an agreement with Sylvester, who then acted as their solicitor, to purchase a group of estates on the island of St Vincent and the Grenadines, comprising of approximately 3,300 acres and known as the Orange Hill Estates.

Two months after the purchase of the estate, the Government compulsorily acquired the land because of an outcry from the people of St Vincent and the Grenadines and, in November 1991, awarded EC$4.7 million, which carried interest of five per cent per annum.

The Danish foundation said it received some money but has sued Sylvester for what it said is the remainder.

School of thought

Cruel Mind Games – Inside the Secret World of a Cult

The Times, second section, 2nd May 2000

by Michael Durham

At 1am on a freezing January night two carloads of people are speeding south down the M1. It is dark. At such an hour you might expect a sleepy silence to reign. But no – a mood of relief and gaiety has gripped the passengers, all foreign, mostly young. It is as if a coiled spring of tension has just snapped, leaving them talking and laughing with relief. It is as though Lars, Annelie, Gita, Simone and Uwe have escaped.

Lars, who is Swedish, is driving the car behind. He rings the lead car on his mobile phone. “What is the speed limit here? I’m doing 90. There’s a police car behind me with a blue light.” For some reason this provokes hilarity. But Lars is not stopped and the journey to London continues.

The place the five are so eager to get away from is a grim, red-brick private college in the windswept flatlands of East Yorkshire, eight miles east of Hull, just outside the village of Winestead. To locals it is Winestead Hall, once a hospital, now some sort of international school. To students who might pick up its brochures in a university common room, read its newspaper ads or surf the Internet, it is the College for International Co-operation and Development (CICD).

The college “educates and prepares people for development work in the Third World” in Angola, Mozambique and Malawi. Students come from Britain, Ireland, China, Poland and New Zealand. Usually they are in their teens and twenties, looking for the opportunity to do some travel and voluntary work abroad before settling down to a university course or job.

Annelie Karlqvist, 20, who lives near Stockholm, saw an ad for CICD in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheder. She went to a meeting in Stockholm and decided to enrol, working as a receptionist and saving for four months to meet the £2,000 CICD asked her to pay in advance. She arrived in England in November and went to Hull, where she found the college a touch spartan and with a disappointingly small staff – one head teacher and a teacher – and no more than a dozen students. But she settled into a routine of classes, household rotas, evening singsongs, class meetings and sports activities, and wrote frequent letters home. It was the letters that gave it away. Her father, Lars, says: “Her mother [Marianne] knew something odd was going on. Annelie described a lifestyle that was not normal for such a college. An older person can see it right away but she is young and thinks it usual.

“It seemed she was never left alone and had almost no time for herself. It was ‘you have to join in’. The work seemed so hard, but it was about the upkeep of the school, not learning about Africa. And she had to spend so much time raising money in the streets and handing out leaflets.”

Two friends in Sweden, Olof and Jessica, were also alarmed by what they read. On the telephone Annelie seemed “burnt out” and to be spending all her waking hours on tasks such as repainting the school walls, working in the kitchen and fundraising. The friends contacted FRI, the Swedish cult information group, which put them in touch with a Dane, Bent Johanessen.

Johanessen confirmed that CICD was connected to the Danish (now worldwide) organisation Tvind. The day before Christmas Eve, Lars and Marianne rang Johanessen in Stockholm. “The sooner you get Annelie home, the better. Don’t let her go back to England,” he said. Over the Christmas holidays Marianne and Lars made phone calls, searched the Internet and filled a binder with papers. One day in Stockholm they sat down with Annelie and her two friends and gave her the dossier, saying: “There are a few things you need to know.” Annelie resolved to return to the school in January, with her father, to collect her belongings and confront the staff.

Meanwhile, other students were growing suspicious. Gita, a New Zealander – who enrolled after seeing an ad in a free newspaper – was the first. So keen a sleuth was she, surfing the Internet and asking questions under the noses of the teachers, that students in the know called her Miss Marple. Gita found they had a lot to learn about the college and its links with other organisations in Scandinavia and the US. CICD acknowledged that it operated “in co-operation with the International Humana People-to-People movement”.

“I was determined to find out who I would be working for, who the managers or top guys of Humana were,” says Gita.

Other students visited from Denmark, where there are several colleges similar to CICD known as “Travelling Folk High Schools”. She asked several about Humana; they all had a stock answer: “We don’t really know Humana. As long as we are going to be doing good work in Africa, we don’t see the need to find out who they are.”

Gita says: “I wondered why no one questioned anything about this mystery organisation that was supposed to send us to Africa to do volunteer work.” But she persisted. One niggle was that CICD always seemed short of money, even though most students had paid thousands of pounds upfront and were constantly sent to collect more money on the streets of Hull, Manchester and Liverpool. In fact, the college appeared so poor that it was falling apart, and students were told to carry out repairs. Yet when Gita met senior staff from Denmark they seemed to represent a wealthy organisation.

Surfing the Internet, Gita began to uncover Winestead Hall’s history. The students had not known, for example, about Winestead Hall School, which occupied the same premises until two years ago. One of CICD’s two teachers, Rolf, had taught there, an expensive residential boarding school for emotionally disturbed teenagers, whose fees were met by English local authorities. The school, run through a charity called Small School at Red House, had been forced to close in January 1998 after investigations by the Charity Commission, education and social services inspectors, and a firm of chartered accountants.

Gita established that the organisation that owned and ran the school was running the college, operating as CICD, Humana People-to-People, Development Aid from People-to-People, UFF, and Planet Aid. She also found the name of Winestead Hall School’s last headmaster: Steen Thomsen, a Dane.

Thomsen, now living in Denmark, revealed some interesting facts. “When I mentioned his name to Karen Barsoe, CICD’s Principal, she looked shocked,” says Gita. Miss Marple had found her mark.

Gita and other students compared notes: “One then found some information about Humana/Tvind and it was not favourable; newspapers had written articles mentioning money misused. All sorts of things ran through our minds, we discussed several possibilities, then decided to confront CICD’s staff.”

Most students were not impressed with the answers they got. “It was upsetting,” says Clare Brogan, from Ireland. “We weren’t told all there was to know. I am so angry at them for making something very bad out of something that could have been so good. It’s a disgrace.” Clare went back to Ireland, Annelie to Sweden, Gita to New Zealand and Simone returned with Uwe, her brother, to Cologne. In all, nine students left CICD after Gita’s discoveries. Karen Barsoe refused to speak to The Times.

Hull-based CICD is Tvind’s main British outpost. Nobody knows what to make of the organisation – it is part “schools co-operation”, part “clothes-recycling project”, part “Third World volunteer organisation”, part instrument of world revolution, part multinational business concern. Some people devote their lives to it, but many believe it is exploiting naive young people.

One person who knows as much as anyone is Thomsen, 51. In 1971, as a university student in Denmark, he saw a notice headed “Do you want to go to India?”. It was an invitation to enrol at a teacher-training college being built in a field outside Ulfborg in western Denmark, on a farm called Tvind. The school was called the Necessary Teacher Training College (DNS).

The man behind DNS was a fellow Dane, Mogens Amdi Petersen, then a 31-year-old schoolteacher and left-wing activist. Unsuccessful in the state system, he had decided to found a school system of his own, apparently with a view to creating paradise on Earth. Within a few years the organisation had 40 schools in Denmark, Norway, England and the US, and a variety of money-raising schemes, all wearing the badge of right-on respectability: clothes-recycling for the Third World, charity flea markets, collections for Africa and volunteer work in Central America.

But it was not paradise on Earth. Thomsen, who remained loyal for 26 years, says Petersen’s baby grew into a monster, a cult in which political correctness, loyalty and obedience to Petersen were the most important things.

Opponents say the same values still apply: loyal followers may be invited to join a select inner circle, the Teachers Group, where they are expected to pool all their resources, income and assets. Loyalty to the cause is everything. Tvind’s hold over its adherents is such that it has spawned a countergroup in Scandinavia, the Movement Against Tvind, dedicated to warning young people about its true nature.

Loyalty to Petersen was at the top of Thomsen’s agenda when he was the Head at Winestead Hall School; now he is a whistleblower. He admitted to The Times that education and social work inspectors had not been told the whole truth about the school. “We gave the impression it was well run; it was not. There were not enough staff to look after the children; we worked all day and half the night. We never admitted that to the inspectors. We were also told to deny any involvement with Tvind.”

He alleges that the school was a “money machine” for Tvind; much of the fees the school got from local authorities to pay for the children’s education were not spent on Winestead at all but were spirited to Denmark via a leasing arrangement with an offshore Channel Islands company that Tvind also happens to run. The link between the school and the offshore company was never disclosed to the Charity Commission in annual accounts.

The commission said it had in 1996 appointed a receiver and manager to run the charity through which Tvind ran the school because of concerns about its financial controls and administration. “The report to the commission from the receiver and manager indicated that substantial sums of charitable money had been unwisely spent on leases taken out on the school premises and on three yachts. It was estimated that hundreds of thousands of pounds had been lost to the charity.” As a result the trustees were suspended and removed by the Charity Commissioners in July 1997.

New trustees were appointed, some of them experienced in education, but later that year the new trustees approached the Charity Commission with serious concerns about the welfare and safety of the children after two inspections by HMI and the placing authorities, Norfolk and East Riding. The receiver and manager was reappointed and said there was no alternative but to close the schools immediately on the ground that the “health, safety and welfare of the children could not be guaranteed”.

The revelations did not surprise Robert Lake, the director of Humberside Social Services with responsibility for the school in the early 1990s. He instructed staff not to send children there and asked officials if it could be closed. When told there were no grounds to do so he wrote to all social services departments advising them not to send children. “It is a matter of public record that in the early 1990s I was very concerned about the care offered to children at Winestead Hall. If the same organisation were to reopen the premises, working in the same way, it would reawaken my concern,” he says.

It is astonishing that, though a connection between Tvind and the schools had long been suspected, Winestead Hall and Red House Schools had avoided detailed scrutiny for so long, for Tvind is very controversial in its native Denmark. Its ability to claim millions of krone from the State in funding for its schools has led to attempts to change the Constitution. Most Danes are aware – and concerned – that Tvind has become a multinational business concern as well as, according to its own lights, an educational and aid charity. Apparently funded by its own members, volunteers, public donations and official grants, Tvind has reportedly invested in property, fruit plantations, old-clothes trading in Central America, Africa and the Pacific – though these commercial ventures are rarely disclosed to young volunteers.

In several countries leading members of the Teachers Group are known to enjoy a second role as directors of commercial concerns linked to Tvind. Last month a Danish Sunday newspaper linked it with a recently opened computer business and a factory making furniture in China. Yet another Tvind subsidiary, Planet Aid, has begun siting clothes-recycling bins and coin-collection boxes in stores and petrol stations across the US, sometimes to the despair of competing local charities.

Though few Danes deem Tvind a cult – it is more often seen as a fringe political movement – it shares many characteristics described by the Cult Information Centre (CIC): a centralised organisation with a powerful leader, dedicated to its own survival and recruiting new members. In France the Chamber of Deputies two years ago cited Humana-Tvind as “une secte” and it has also been listed as a cult by a Belgian parliamentary inquiry. The experience of several longstanding members supports this.

Thomsen, who was close to the core leadership and received regular phone calls from Petersen, describes an organisation riddled with paranoia, misinformation and topsy-turvy values. Britta Rasmussen, a Dane who worked for Tvind for seven years, realised the gravity of her situation when she was refused permission to fly home from her post in America to visit her mother, who had terminal cancer. Rasmussen stole her passport from an office at 4am, climbed out of a window and hitch-hiked to New York. Others who have left have similar stories, and many are traumatised. Anne Ellingsen, a Norwegian former volunteer, told a conference on cults in 1993: “The sect is dangerous and should be watched with attention by authorities and private persons wherever it operates.”

Tvind’s supporters say 40,000 young people have benefited from the schools and contact with the Third World. So what is so dangerous about Tvind? Quite apart from the flow of allegations about psychological pressure from those who have been most closely involved, a stream of young people who have spent only a few months as volunteer solidarity workers have come forward with alarming stories. They say workers often become blinkered to commonsense rules about safety because of the ideological pre-eminence of the cause to which they have become committed.

Tvind students of both sexes are often expected to hitch-hike, seek accommodation with strangers and walk the streets of foreign cities alone. In 1983 eight young members of the Teachers Group died when their ship, the Activ, sank in a gale in the English channel. It later emerged that the ship was not seaworthy and its crew had no experience; but they had been summoned to a meeting in Denmark. Else Waale, some of whose friends died, says: “It was unthinkable not to go, there was no excuse for staying away. So they died for it.”

Despite setbacks, Tvind continues to find Britain a fertile ground for recruitment. CICD and its sister colleges in Scandinavia advertise in Britain for young people to train as solidarity workers, sending volunteers to distribute leaflets in university common rooms, placing ads in regional and national newspapers, and magazines likely to be read by young people.

In Britain the leading educational charities offering advice on cults, the CIC and FAIR (Family, Action, Information and Resource), have received complaints about Tvind and its organisations and say they have received requests for help. “I’d be very concerned for the welfare of anyone associated with Tvind or any of its associated companies,” says Ian Haworth of the CIC.

Dr Elizabeth Tilden, a consultant psychiatrist with an interest in mind control, has studied other “potential” cults and has met cases of people damaged by contact with such cults. They refused to accept any criticism of the cause they had joined, even if presented with evidence of financial or moral wrongdoing. “You believe what you are being asked to do is for the good of humanity and are persuaded that the way you are acting is the right way. Often there is an extreme degree of privation. You become a martyr, your self is no longer important, you glorify the cause and nothing else matters,” she said.

“Cults like this usually are careful to select highly intelligent people with a good background, and it is important that they be people with strong moral fibre, or who have had a religious upbringing. The cult gets them by breaking that down and substituting its own values. It becomes a belief system, and can be so thorough that you can become isolated from everything, particularly from parents, friends and loved ones. It is your new job.”

Or, as one anonymous informant wrote in an e-mail: “Be careful, look out for yourself and don’t give them any money.” Another wrote: “Tvind and all the enthusiastic people working at its organisations know the answers of everything. Join them, and you will never have to worry about thinking for yourself.”

If there is one person we would like to ask all about this, it is Mogens Amdi Petersen, now 61, healthy and, close informants say, still very much in charge of the organisation he created. But don’t let us get too hopeful – Petersen went “underground” more than 20 years ago. He has not been seen in public, held a photo opportunity or given a press conference in all that time. Only a handful of people know his whereabouts at any one time; insiders say he is living in Florida or Zimbabwe.

One person who would like to find him is Annelie – and so would her parents. Lars, who flew over from Sweden especially to bring his daughter home, aimed to confront the teachers at CICD. But, when cornered, the two Tvind teachers at Winestead simply turned on the charm, denied that anything was amiss and seemed not to understand why all the young people couldn’t think like them – that’s the Tvind way.

“I’m so relieved to be out of there,” says Annelie. “Another two months and who knows how I might have ended up?”

Case history 1 – Bob Nelson

BOB NELSON, 23, a former pig farmer from Huntly, near Aberdeen, enrolled with Tvind after seeing an ad headed “Africa needs you”. He rang the number and was invited to Denmark for an “information weekend”, which he described as exciting. He was promised training, then work on an aid project in Africa.

Unable to afford the £2,000 advance fee, he agreed to work as a volunteer for three months at a clothes-sorting centre in Norway to defray the costs. Once there, he says he was expected to work up to 16 hours a day in return for living expenses of £30 a week. When he demurred his boss was unsympathetic. “He was a workaholic and wouldn’t accept criticism. The place was in chaos. We were given more work than we could cope with but there was no reasoning with him.”

In February 1999 he went to the Travelling Folk High School in Denmark, where he expected to learn practical skills. But he says: “There was no proper training. The teachers had no respect for the students and the students held the staff in contempt.”

After eight weeks he was sent out to raise money on the streets of Copenhagen, selling college newspapers to passers-by. Students had a target of £100 a day and were told that if they did not achieve it, they could not go to Africa. But Nelson grew suspicious when people on the street told him he was raising money on false pretences. “Everyone in Denmark knows about Tvind and most people despise it,” he says. “They would tell me to ask the teachers about Mogens Amdi Petersen, and about where the money was going. When I did the teachers got defensive and hostile and wouldn’t talk about it.”

Nelson hoped his time in Mozambique would prove better. But when he arrived in Maputo with one other solidarity worker there was no one to meet him; he had to find his own way to the ADPP compound. He handed over his passport and had to travel without proper documents for the next five months. At Tvind’s teacher training college in Nacala, where he was supposed to train young Africans, the administration was chaotic. “There was no leadership, we felt lost. It was six or seven weeks before there was a proper meeting and we were told what to do. The school was tense. The Danish project leaders had tunnel vision. The Africans hated the Danes, called them neo-colonialists.”

Eventually, Nelson left the project a month early, retrieved his passport and made his way home through Zimbabwe and South Africa. “These people use the prospect of going to Africa as bait; once you are hooked they get what they want from you,” he says. “It’s all about money and getting people to join. They make you work veryhard and undermine your independence. They get you to do things over and over without questioning anything. After a while you stop thinking for yourself; if you are weak, you end up becoming one of them.

“They don’t care for anyone but themselves. I met lots of genuine, lovely people who were being used and abused in the same way.”

Case history 2 - Nick Moss

AS A 21-year-old graduate Nick Moss thought he would be helping Africa’s poor when he enrolled at Travelling Folk High School in Juelsminde, western Denmark. But after six disastrous months in Angola he concluded Tvind was more interested in its own status and power than alleviating world poverty, and has since publicly campaigned against the organisation.

Within a week of arriving at Juelsminde Moss, from Hull, became suspicious of the teaching methods. Older teachers employed classic manipulative techniques to pressurise young students and make them conform to their own ideology, he says. “There was a tendency among the members of the Teachers Group to control the intellectual and social interaction of students. Intimidation, shouting people down and the manipulation of group dynamics in a way I can only describe as Stalinistic were common techniques.” Moss himself was “berated” for “not participating enough” in a debate and subjected to ridicule before other students, apparently because of his university education. “My teacher was offensive and threatening. I put up with it because I thought it would all work out when I got to Africa.”

Moss spent weeks raising funds, selling postcards on the streets in Germany, before arriving in Angola in February 1996. There things were even worse. Volunteers had to share a house in isolated Mosquito Valley, with poor security and no electricity, though Danish project leaders lived in better conditions in the local town, Benguela. The team’s radio rarely worked. “Bullets regularly flew over the roof as armed guards defended the surrounding banana plantations from theft. We had not been prepared for any of this.”

Within a week of arriving he contracted malaria but claims that a project leader did not take him to a clinic for five days. During four bouts of malaria his temperature hit 41C, but he saw only a local doctor and on one occasion was told he would have to send a fax to Denmark before other treatment could be authorised. “Young people who go to Africa with Tvind are placed at unnecessary risk,” he says.

An old idea recycled

FIVE years ago Humana UK was one of Britain’s main clothes-recycling charities. It was a big outpost of Tvind’s empire, ostensibly channelling thousands of pounds to African aid projects. Last year the Charity Commission in effect closed Humana because of concerns that the money might not be used for its intended purpose. But Tvind has reappeared, as Planet Aid UK. Its publicity director, Danish-born Birgit Soe, says it has a mission to “see the country filled” with clothes collection boxes. But Planet Aid UK is a commercial venture, not a charity.

In Kettering, Planet Aid boxes have appeared outside post offices and pubs. A council officer says a man with a foreign accent rang on behalf of Planet Aid UK and assured them it was a registered charity. In fact, Planet Aid UK applied to the Charity Commission for charity status but then withdrew the application. The address given, in Goldsmith Avenue, London W3, was used in the past by Humana.

The commission began investigating Humana after newspaper reports in 1993 suggested that only 8 per cent of its income was being used for charity, with the rest spent on “administration”.

Humana UK was put in receivership and the commission used new powers to appoint additional, non-Tvind, trustees to the charity’s board. But last year, with new and old trustees unable to work together, the commission dismissed all the Scandinavian ones and put the charity under new management; 900 Humana clothes collection boxes around Britain and its seven shops are the responsibility of Textile Recycling for Aid and International Development, which is rebranding them. The money Traid raises is being passed to charities such as Oxfam and Care International.

Charity’s recycling claims mislead public

From the Independent on Sunday, London, 17th December 2000

* This is the complete text.   The article was edited for space reasons.  Text cut for space reasons and therefore not finally published in the newspaper is included here in blue.

See also: Green World Recycling, Gaia-Movement Trust (Switzerland) and Gaia (USA)

by Michael Durham

Outside the Asda store in the West Midlands suburb of Great Barr there is a green metal container. Last week shoppers dumped nearly half a ton of old clothes and shoes into it. They believed they were helping the environment.

The bin is one of about 200 spread throughout the West Midlands, West Country, South Wales and Southern England by Green World Recycling Ltd.

On the side of the bin a notice lists an ambitious programme of 18 objectives. With the money raised by selling the clothes, it proclaims, ‘We hire rangers, install trails for eco-tourism, arrange nature study camps for schools, conduct scientific studies….’

The bin is marked as the property of The Gaia-Movement Trust Living Earth Green World Action. The Great Barr bin, like all the others, is emptied three times a week; the contents are driven to a warehouse on the Blue Bird industrial estate in Wolverhampton. From there once a week a trailer, usually from Poland, Russia or the Ukraine, is filled with about 15 tons – at £400 a ton they are worth about £6,000 – of old garments and driven abroad. Twice a month a similar lorry leaves an industrial estate in Queensborough, Kent.

That adds up to a turnover of around £468,000 a year. Once a week, a fax arrives at Green World Recycling from an offshore company registered in Jersey, Holland House, confirming payments of several thousand pounds a week to Green World for the clothes. (Oddly, the sums transferred by Holland House to Green World are usually rather less than the sums Green World has invoiced for.)

Twice in recent months, Green World recycling has received transfers of nearly £20,000 from an unidentified bank account at the Deutsche Bank in Germany.

Yet although Green World Recycling has been in business for nearly three years, it has not yet given a penny to charity – nor is there any evidence that any of the projects advertised by The Gaia-movement Trust Living Earth Green World Action exist, except on paper. At the same time another company called Planet Aid UK is also collecting in the Midlands and the North in aid of development aid in the Third World their bins have surfaced in car parks and pub forecourts from Kettering to Sheffield.

Both companies are run by Torben and Birgit Soe, a married couple from Denmark. Torben, well over 6ft 6in tall, runs Green World Recycling from a tatty office on the Wolverhampton industrial estate, drives an old Renault van and lives in a modest semi-detached in Tamworth, Staffordshire. Those who know him describe him as a kind, well-meaning, unassuming man with a poor business sense. His wife, Birgit, who runs Planet Aid UK, is said to have more finely tuned business instincts.

Both belong to an organisation called The Teachers Group, sometimes known as Tvind. The Teachers Group has a long and colourful history, having brushed with authority in its native country, Denmark, and latterly in other parts of the world. In May, newspapers reported on the distressing experiences of several young people at a Teachers Group private college in Yorkshire, from which they fled complaining that they had been misled, and that crude attempts had been made to indoctrinate them.

To many of these idealistic men and women The Teachers Group is more closely identified with making and keeping money than with spending it on good causes, other than the Teachers Group itself. It is run on the principles of a common economy its

members are obliged to pool their incomes and wealth. They also submit to iron discipline. Hardly a penny of the millions raised by the Teachers Group goes to the world outside – it is invariably spent on its own charities. And because it is passed across national boundaries and through offshore accounts, it is seldom accountable.

The founder of the Teachers Group, a charismatic Dane named Mogens Amdi Petersen, has not made a public appearance since 1979 and is zealously protected by his supporters somewhere in Florida, Zimbabwe or the Cayman Islands. This strange, secret empire of several hundred ideologues is the organisation collecting through Green World and Planet Aid across Britain.

Three years ago Torben and Birgit Soe were associated with another clothes recycling charity, Humana UK, which fell foul of the Charity Commission for financial mismanagement. It too was part of the Teachers Group. When it was investigated only eight per cent of its turnover was going to ‘good causes’. Humana was closed down.

Birgit Soe is also a director of the College for International Cooperation and Development near Hull, east Yorkshire, from which the students fled – a property which was itself the subject of Charity Commission inquiries in 1997, when it was a Teachers Group school for disturbed children.

Holland House, with an address in Gibraltar, is known to be an important Teachers Group trading company

In the 1970s, before they joined the Teachers Group, the Soes had run a socialist clothing factory in Kullerup, Denmark. Later, they managed it as a joint project with a Teachers Group school, Vamdrup Efterskole. According to former colleagues, the enterprise did not prosper and Torben Soe earned the dislike of his uncompromising master, Mogens Petersen.

“Torben has been humiliated during many years by Mogens Amdi Petersen, but

he kept bending his head low and working,” one ex-colleague says. “At the first meeting with the Teachers Group Torben declared that he was proud to have become a member of TG. Amdi Petersen scolded him for saying so ‘because TG is not a sewing club – it is dirty hard revolutionary work’.”

The Soes went on to work for UFF, another Teachers group recycling concern in Scandinavia, before arriving in England to help run first Humana UK, and then the present recycling enterprises. So what good works does Green World Recycling support?

Soe and his wife make no claim that either Green World or Planet Aid UK are charities. Neither is registered with the charity commission they are both private limited comanies. The ambiguous notices on the Green World recycling bins might suggest that the clothes support three charities – The Gaia-movement Trust, Living Earth, and Green World Action.

Until a representative of the British environmental foundation, Living Earth, saw the organisation’s name on a Green World bin it had never heard of Green World Recyling, and has never received money from it. “We complained to Green World and reported them to the Charity Commission. We never heard anything from Green World,” says Roger Hammond, acting chief executive of Living Earth. Similarly, the Gaia Trust of Denmark has no connection with any Gaia-Movement Trust.

Soe has told employees that when Green World has a revenue surplus, it will be passed to a foundation in Switzerland. We found The Gaia-movement Trust Living Earth Green World Action registered in Geneva at an accommodation address in the Geneva World Trade Centre. There is no Gaia office in the building – the address and phone number belong to a British businessman, Michael Rogers, who has no connection with Gaia but passes on mail.

And almost everyone listed as a signatory of the Geneva company is known to be a member of Mogens Amdi Petersen’s Teachers Group. They include Peter Kjaer and Lilian Ekbom who give their addresses in Fiji, Jonas Israel in Borneo, Soeren Soerensen and Andreas Stier in Belize. Soerensen is head of a huge mango plantation at Monkey River estate in Belize. This is one of the Teachers Group’s biggest commercial undertakings and has nothing to do with helping the third world or the environment. Jonas Israel, a US citizen and the son of one of Denmark’s leading sociology professors, has run companies in Denmark, the US, Britain and Holland for the Teachers Group.

We also tracked The Gaia-movement Trust to the United States, this time under the title The Gaia Living Earth Movement Green World Action USA. This body runs a thrift shop at 2918 N Clark Street, Chicago and another in Milwaukee. The Gaia Living Earth Movement Green World Action USA has been in business for a year in the United States, where it joins the Teachers Group’s other large enterprise, Planet Aid, in collecting and reselling old clothes. At the Milwaukee store Helle Lund – a former company secretary of Humana UK – says The Gaia Living Earth Movement Green World Action USA has not given any money to charity, either. “We are not supporting any yet. We are a brand new organisation and we are in the start-up phase.”

Has the organisation decided which charities to support? “It will be up to the board. It will be something to do with the environment, animals, climate change, that sort of thing,” she replies.

The only indication that any of pledges made by The Gaia-Movement Trust Living Earth Green World Action might be honoured comes from Zimbabwe, in a privately printed book about game management. The Teachers Group charity Humana People-to-People has its headquarters in Zimbabwe and the book is a joint production with Mike La Grange, who runs a company, Game Management Africa, in Harare. The book details the minutiae of handling buffalo and giraffes, but gives no indication of any charitable work the movement is supposed to be carrying out. There is no Gaia-Movement address or phone number.

Mike la Grange said the Gaia-Movement Trust had invested in his company. He had written the book at the request of a Dane, Svend Soerensen, ‘for the benefit of Gaia’s overseas directors.’ ‘I am a little bit vague about exactly what they are. I think they are a little bit of everything. They have got businesses all over the place here and they do a bit of social work. They do a lot of farming. I think they are connected with Humana. You will have to ask them about charities and nature reserves.’ We were unable to reach Svend Soerensen at the mobile telephone number Mr le Grange supplied.

Planet Aid’s cheeky venture in the Midlands has already been noted by the Textile Recycling Association, which has consulted recycling charities about its concern. Five charities, Barnardo’s, the British Heart Foundation, Oxfam, The Salvation Army, and Scope have, with the TRA and Recyclatex, another trade body, drawn up a joint letter to be sent to local authorities and supermarkets, pointing out concerns about Planet Aid and recommending they consider carefully before allowing Planet Aid boxes on their land. “Research indicates Planet Aid UK Ltd is directly related to Humana and thence to Tvind,” the letter says. But the charities can not agree on the precise wording and the letter has not been sent.

THREE members of Green World’s staff contacted admitted they shared serious concerns about the operation. “We were told that Green World was not a charity, but when it made enough profit the money would go to Gaia. It seemed like a good idea, I worked my butt off – but it’s gone nowhere,” says one staff member.

“I asked Torben where the money went and he said ‘Oh, we haven’t given any money to charity yet.’ That’s when alarm bells started ringing. I asked about the Gaia Movement Trust. All he would say was that it was somewhere in Switzerland, and that it had started at the same time as Green World, but he didn’t seem to know any more. I said ‘What will you tell the public?’ He just said it would be all right. I honestly believe he believes in what he is doing, but he just does what he’s told. Someone else is giving him orders.”

Another former member of staff – who found himself explaining green issues and the environment to Torben Soe – says “If you met Torben socially you would say he was a nice man. But he hasn’t got the right business acumen and he doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing. Either he’s not aware of the true financial situation, or someone else is pulling the strings.”

So what does happen to the money Green World Recycling and Planet Aid make? What good causes are the environmentally-conscious citizens of Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Cardiff, Bristol, Gloucester and Cheltenham helping to support – and those of Kettering, Derby, Sheffield and Northampton when they drop clothes into a Planet Aid box?

“The money will go to a good cause. Everybody knows it takes time to start up a company. We’re just not there yet,” Soe says. “We’re not in a position to be able to give anything away.”

FastCounter by bCentral

Recycling Group Meets Resistance

Wisconsin State Journal, Sunday, April 7, 2002

Locator map

by George Hesselberg    ghesselberg@madison.com.

Eva Nielsen sat in the coldest corner of a McDonald’s restaurant on West Washington Avenue one afternoon last week and confessed she was stunned.

All she wants to do, the native of Denmark said, was place 60 big green metal boxes around the city of Madison, in the parking lots of gasoline stations and convenience stores. The people of Madison could fill those boxes with old clothes. Then her group would empty the boxes, weekly at least, and sort the clothes in Chicago.

Some would be sold at one of the group’s two used-clothing stores in that city. The rest would be packaged and sent overseas, probably to a sorting plant in Tunisia. The money from the operation would go to pay for environmental projects in Africa and India.

Nielsen, 55, knows what she is doing. She has done this in Honduras, in Armenia. She has taught in her group’s ”nontraditional” schools for troubled youth in Denmark, where she started as a student herself in the 1970s. She has even been headmaster at her group’s schools. She has led students to help in Africa and India.

Madison seemed like the perfect place to expand to from Chicago.

“I think 60 boxes would be possible for what I think can be done here,” said Nielsen, who figures a population of 4,000 for each box

She has, however, just come from a visit with George Dreckmann, the city of Madison’s recycling coordinator. He was cordial and interested, she said, but also skeptical about the group’s background.    Promotional help from the city would go a long way to filling the group’s clothes boxes in Madison.

The group is Gaia Movement Living Earth Green World Action USA. It is connected — loosely, spiritually, probably financially — with a much larger group, Planet Aid. And, beyond that, it’s connected to a group known as “Tvind,” or “The Teachers Group,” which was started in Denmark in the 1970s by a charismatic, reclusive and now jailed leader, Mogens Amdi Petersen. It has since grown to include schools, businesses and plantations and, at the center, the Teachers Group. That group pools its money and resources under many names.

There are numerous Web sites devoted to debunking Tvind and tracing a seemingly endless web of tax havens, phony projects and front business, and the other side has Web sites devoted to explaining the various environmental projects supported by Tvind. A couple of large British newspapers, the Guardian and the Independent, have published investigative stories critical of the |movement, claiming the money raised is not used for charitable or environmental works.

Nielsen sighs at all this and claims she just wants to collect old clothes to raise money that supports her nonprofit group’s worldwide environmental projects.

In three years, however, no money has gone to charitable or environmental projects. Nielsen said the stores barely break even and money from selling the surplus clothes overseas has been used to pay for  donation boxes. A modest $24,000 has been raised in two years. She said she needs a minimum of $50,000 to support just one project.

It probably did not help her cause’s effort in Madison that one of the group’s supporters in Chicago, Elton Davis, sent an e-mail to “Sustain Dane,” a respected area environmental group, announcing that Gaia would be in Madison next week with six volunteers looking for donation box sites. Sustain Dane did some research and passed along some of the critical newspaper articles to its membership.

Said Per Kielland-Lund, of Sustain Dane: “If they could prove that they are doing good work and a significant portion of their profits go to good projects, then we could consider working with them. As it is now, we will not.”

Nielsen said she “cannot understand the negative hits” on the group to which she has devoted her life, and said the bad publicity was “a lie.”

“I don’t care” about the publicity, she said. “I try to do something good and not pay attention to this. I try to be honest and hard-working.”

Her group is not a religion, not a political party and is not asking for money.

“I am a member of a group of people who have decided to share all their time and money. We are not a cult. We are the opposite of a cult.”

In Los Angeles, however, Nielsen’s leader, Petersen, is jailed on Danish charges of tax fraud — all those environmental and educational projects were either hoaxes or for profit, the government charges — and embezzlement of about $10 million.

Petersen has been living “in secret in a $10 million condominium on Fisher Island, a private retreat off the South Florida coast,” the Los Angeles Times reports. The paper also reports Petersen has recently applied for citizenship in Zimbabwe and Brazil, which do not have extradition treaties with Denmark

Back in Madison, Dreckmann at the city recycling office would like to help Nielsen with some promotion, but is waiting to hear about those charitable projects.

Anything that will increase recycling in the city is good, he said, and he is not the police, but there are certain red flags waving above this organization.

Meanwhile, Nielsen surely must have heard some of this before. She believes she is just collecting clothes for her green boxes, but acknowledges a near lifelong devotion to Petersen’s causes and organization. Her group, which is properly registered in Illinois, is not registered to collect anything in Wisconsin, yet, she said.

“It would be a waste of money to put our boxes here if opinion is against us,” she said.

CHARGES PROMPT AG (Attorney General) REVIEW OF CHARITY

DENMARK CALLS GROUP A `FRONT’

Boston Globe, Sept 17th 2002

Author(s): Farah Stockman

The state attorney general’s office has said that it is reviewing the case of a Massachusetts-based charity run by a group that is accused in Denmark of setting up charities as “front organizations” for commercial businesses.

The charity, Planet Aid, says its two area stores, which sell used clothing to benefit the homeless, don’t take a profit and continue to raise substantial sums for the poor. Planet Aid, with stores in Harvard Square and on Newbury Street in Boston, is run by members of the Teachers Group, an informal network of activists that Danish prosecutors say set up a rain forest conservation project that turned out to be a commercial sawmill and funneled millions of dollars for their leaders’ personal use.

Ester Neltrup, a general manager at Planet Aid, said she and Planet Aid’s board of directors are members of the Teachers Group, but said the charges in Denmark against eight Teachers Group leaders have nothing to do with the used-clothing charity. She also said the Danish government unfairly scrutinized the liberal group for political reasons.

“The Danish government holds the activities of people in the Teachers Group to a higher standard than people who are not in the Teachers Group,” she said.
Neltrup called the accusations against her fellow Teachers Group members “odd” and “explosive”.

The Teachers Group is a network of a few hundred activists who make a life commitment to the group and donate their salaries to a common pool. Started in Denmark in 1970 by a man named Mogens Amdi Petersen, Teachers Group members have founded schools and development projects around the world under the banner Humana People to People Movement. In recent years questions about their finances have prompted authorities in England and Belgium to take action against charities run by members of the group. French authorities have classified them as a nonreligious cult.

Teachers Group members have run nonprofit organizations in the United States for more than a decade, with Massachusetts as the headquarters of both Planet Aid and the Williamstown-based International Institute for Cooperation and Development. Planet Aid collects used clothing across the country and resells it, donating the profits to charity. The International Institute sends volunteers overseas. Teachers Group members also run US’Again, a profit used-clothing business based in Atlanta, and Garson & Shaw, the wholesale used-clothing broker that buys and resells most of Planet Aid’s clothes.

The Teachers Group did not stir controversy in the United States until last February, when the FBI arrested Petersen on an Interpol warrant from Denmark. Seven other Teachers Group members, including one who worked for the International Institute, have been charged in Denmark with tax fraud and embezzlement. In a separate case, Belgian authorities have accused Teachers Group members of money-laundering.

According to documents filed by assistant US attorney Mathew E. Sloan, the charities that one Teachers Group fund donated to were “little more than front organizations to funnel back money to the Teachers Group and the defendants for their own personal gain.”

Planet Aid officials say the Teachers Group is a personal choice, not a formal organization, and have distanced themselves from Petersen.

“He has nothing to do with Planet Aid,” said Neltrup, “and his situation has no consequences for Planet Aid.”

Yet three of Planet Aid’s five board members, including Neltrup, submitted affidavits in support of Pedersen during his extradition proceedings, attesting to the fact that they had “knowingly, intentionally, and voluntarily entered into a eleven-year obligation to donate money directly” from their salaries to the fund that Pedersen is accused of mismanaging. About 140 Teachers Group members submitted similar affidavits from all over the world.

Neltrup said she gave money to the fund only for a short time, as a personal choice, and that the funds, as far as she knew, were used for humanitarian purposes.

Mikael Norling, Planet Aid’s president who is also a founder of the International Institute, appeared on Petersen’s witness list as someone who would testify that one of the Teacher Group’s alleged “front” companies was, in fact, a humanitarian project. Norling could not be reached for comment.

Doug Bailey, who works for Rasky/Baerlein Group, a Boston public relations firm that Planet Aid hired after Pedersen’s arrest, said Petersen was simply “a friend” of Planet Aid officials.

Poul Gode, a deputy prosecutor in Denmark’s Division of Serious Economic Crimes, said he had no evidence that Teachers Group members had done anything illegal in Massachusetts.

Sarah Nathan, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, said she could neither confirm nor deny an investigation, but acknowledged that her office is “reviewing the situation.”

World charity group under investigation

Toronto organization denies ties to four indicted Danes

National Post, Canada, April 27, 2002

by Brian Hutchinson

Chris Bolin, National Post

ELLEN SHIFRIN: “The money had basically been thrown away.”

Ellen Shifrin just wanted to help people. A retired Toronto school teacher with a lifetime interest in overseas volunteer work, she thought she had found her dream assignment: a six-month stint in rural India, helping improve the lives of impoverished and disease-stricken villagers.

But there was a catch. The organization that offered the program — something called the Institute for International Co-operation and Development (IICD) — required Shifrin to spend US$5,300 on a five-month “training program” in southwestern Michigan. Only after she had completed the program would IICD send her to India. She agreed.

This, she now says, was a big mistake.

In August, 2000, Shifrin arrived in the small town of Dowagiac, Mich., population 6,500. She was assigned a room in an old college dormitory run by IICD, and was introduced to 15 other volunteers, most of whom were in their early twenties. Dubbed “development instructors,” they had all paid the same US$5,300 training fee.

Shifrin was prepared for a rigorous program, including Hindi language instruction. Instead, the group spent almost half its time travelling by van across Michigan, sleeping in shelters and soliciting donations door-to-door in such places as Kalamazoo, Anne Arbor and Lansing. They also travelled to California, where they spent a month raising money in the streets of Santa Cruz.

“We each had to raise another US$6,000 to offset our expenses once we got to India,” Shifrin says. “That was the goal we had to reach before we could go to India.”

Living conditions were miserable, she recalls. In order to save money, IICD allowed its “volunteer” development instructors a daily food allowance of just US$3. “We had to buy the cheapest food available,” Shifrin says. “I spent a lot of my time cooking for the others.”

Some of the development instructors began to refer to their dormitory in Dowagiac as “the holding tank,” and spent most of their time smoking, drinking and watching television.

Supervising them was a young Norwegian woman named Line Henriksen, who, Shifrin eventually learned, was a member of the Teachers Group, a controversial Danish organization that runs IICD and dozens of other humanitarian and fundraising organizations around the planet.

These organizations include Humana People to People, a far-reaching, international aid organization based in Zimbabwe.

They also include a Toronto-based charity called Planet Aid Canada, which collects used clothing from 200 yellow donation boxes placed across the Toronto area.

The clothing is then sorted and sold from Planet Aid’s three retail stores in the city’s downtown core.

Planet Aid’s president is Carsten Hansen, a tall, Danish-born member of the Teachers Group. He says the charity funnels all of its surplus revenues to Humana and that it also helps recruit volunteers for its programs overseas.

“Humana does amazing things all over the world,” Hansen told the National Post. “It’s an excellent organization and it takes its role and responsibilities in the developing world very seriously. All of the development instructors are well-prepared ahead of time.”

On the contrary, says Shifrin. “We weren’t prepared for India at all. I’ve been there five times and I knew that we needed to be able to communicate in Hindi. But there was this incredible arrogance. Line [Henriksen] knew what was best, although she’d never even been to India.”

In January, 2001, after raising the additional US$6,000, Shifrin arrived in India with several of her fellow trainees. They were assigned to a small village, where they were introduced to some local people recruited by the Teachers Group.

“We were all supposed to be working for Humana but Humana gave us no support, no resources, nothing,” says Shifrin. “We were just kind of left there.”

Shifrin spent one month in the village before being posted to Humana’s office and residence in Jaipur, where she helped plan a conference on poverty.

In Jaipur, her living conditions improved dramatically. “It was extravagance,” she says, “nothing that ordinary Indians would experience. We had someone to clean after us, and another person to cook for us.”

But her frustration grew with each passing day. Shifrin became convinced Humana was a sham. “There was no accountability. There were doctored reports. One fellow wrote that we’d built all these latrines. It wasn’t true. There was an incredible amount of inertia surrounding everything. I didn’t see much being done for the Indian people.”

In April, she heard the news that four high-ranking members of the Teachers Group had been charged with fraud. Danish police accused them of “misappropriating funds and donations earmarked for humanitarian purposes.”

The four — including Teachers Group founder Mogens Amdi Petersen — were accused of embezzlement and tax fraud involving $35-million, money supposedly directed to several of the group’s charitable organizations between 1987 and 2000.

Shifrin was appalled; incredibly, the news didn’t faze her co-workers. A month later, she decided she’d had enough. She returned to Canada after only five months with Humana in India.

“When I got back, I wrote letters to newspapers in every city where I’d raised money. I apologized for collecting money for IICD and Humana, and I said that the money had basically been thrown away.”

She also contacted Toronto Star columnist Michele Landsberg, whose husband, Stephen Lewis, is the United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. Shifrin thought Landsberg might be interested to hear a true tale of negligence in the development industry. “She told me to write down my story and send it to her,” says Shifrin. “I did, but I never heard back from her.”

No one seemed interested in her experience, so Shifrin decided to put it behind her. She turned to substitute teaching in Toronto and got on with her life, a little wiser, a little poorer.

And then everything changed.

- – -

Two months ago, on Feb. 17, Mogens Amdi Petersen, the Teachers Group’s alleged mastermind, was arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport. He was, reportedly, attempting to travel to Zimbabwe, where Humana, the Teachers Group’s key development and fundraising arm, is based.

Petersen, 63, is being held without bail in a Los Angeles area prison, awaiting an extradition hearing; Danish authorities are keen to have him return to Denmark to face fraud charges. He has hired Robert Shapiro as his defence lawyer who, seven years ago, successfully helped O.J. Simpson beat murder charges.

Petersen’s arrest caused a sensation in Denmark, where the Teachers Group — also known as Tvind — has for years been synonymous with scandal and greed.

Established in the early 1970s by Petersen and several other teachers, the group offered free, alternative-style education to troubled Danish youths. Its methods — which included taking students on long, unstructured trips around the world — became popular, and the Teachers Group soon obtained large amounts of funding from governments in Denmark and other European countries. Approximately 50 schools were established across Europe. Teachers within the group were given room, board and a small amount of money; as much as 85% of their government-subsidized salaries were deposited into the group’s main coffers.

In 1979, amid criticism the Teachers Group and its agencies were engaged in deceptive practices and mired in self-interest, Petersen vanished from Denmark. However, Danish investigators believed he continued to direct Tvind’s activities from a remote location.

Last November, Danish reporters found Petersen living under an assumed name in a $10-million condominium on Fisher Island, one of Miami’s wealthiest enclaves. In order to house his two Leonhand dogs comfortably, Petersen was reported to have bought a second condo in the same exclusive complex. He also kept two late-model Mercedes Benz SUVs on-hand.

How could Petersen afford such a luxurious lifestyle? According to documents released by Denmark’s Public Prosecutor for Serious Economic Crime, the condos were purchased by a Tvind subsidiary, one of its many “holding companies placed in typical tax haven countries…. The police estimate that today the Tvind Group controls assets (cash, properties, etc.) amounting to several thousand million” Danish kroner, approximately $500-million in Canadian funds.

The Teachers Group has “expanded far beyond pure school activities,” and now consists of “more than 100 companies and foundations,” including Third World fruit plantations, shoe factories, sawmills, recycling companies and, of course, relief agencies such as Humana People to People and Planet Aid Canada.

But according to Planet Aid’s Hansen, his charity has no ties to either Petersen or the three other Teachers Group honchos charged by Danish authorities with fraud.

“It is messy, and it’s unfortunate, but it doesn’t have anything to do with us,” insists Hansen, sitting in a small meeting room inside Planet Aid’s modest headquarters on Yonge Street, downtown Toronto.

“Nobody charged or arrested in that matter has anything to do with Planet Aid,” he says.

Hansen, however, is himself a member of the Teachers Group, and a veteran Humana worker. He admits he has encountered Petersen on several “social occasions” since the Tvind founder went into hiding in 1979. He isn’t bothered by accounts of Petersen’s luxurious Fisher Island hideaway. “The guy must have made some money. So what? He’s a very serious, hard-working person.”

Improbably, Hansen adds that Planet Aid is “completely independent” from Humana, as well. “We are a federally registered Canadian charity,” Mr. Hansen says. “The law says that we can’t be directed by anyone outside of Canada.” That, he says, “would be illegal.”

And yet Hansen says he established Planet Aid five years ago with Humana’s blessing. Last year, he says, Planet Aid donated all of its surplus revenues — approximately $30,000 — to Humana. (According to documents it filed with the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, Planet Aid had revenues of $1.7-million between 1998 and 2000, yet claims to have run an operating deficit in those years and therefore did not forward any surpluses to Humana). Hansen hopes to contribute $60,000 to Humana this year.

Planet Aid also helps in the effort to recruit Development Instructors for Humana. Its three Toronto stores are plastered with Humana posters and pamphlets challenging people to become involved in its overseas projects, and extolling the benefits of working in the developing world.

“It is a human obligation,” reads one brochure. “Humana People to People is good at mobilizing people, organizing things on grass root level [sic], liberating the forces of the many, making things happen and getting plans off the ground. These and many more sides are brilliant and unique strengths of Humana People to People.”

Nowhere is it mentioned what Humana does for the people it claims to serve, or how it spends its resources. “I suggest you contact Humana people in Zimbabwe” to find out, Hansen says.

He goes on to defend the fee Humana subsidiary IICD charges its Development Instructors for its five-week training and fundraising program. “It’s not a lot of money for the living expenses and the travel involved,” he says. “You have to have good in your heart and really want to make a difference. Unfortunately, there are always some people who will complain about anything.”

- – -

That, says Maureen Ross-Smith, is “absolute bullshit.”

A retired corrections officer from Brampton, she hooked up with Planet Aid last year, pulling several volunteer shifts in its Yonge St. retail outlet before sending IICD its fee and moving into its dormitory in Dowagiac, Mich. “I was about to retire, and I’d been looking to volunteer with something. I went to an IICD meeting in Toronto and the next thing I knew, I was going to go to Guatemala and help street women, or so I thought. I thought the program sounded great.”

What she found was something rather less. “All we did was cook, clean, and plan our fundraising,” she says. “There was no development training. We were offered three Spanish classes in the seven weeks that I was there.”

Her worst experience, she says, came on a fundraising expedition to St. Paul, Minn. “A group of us were sent off in this really unsafe van. It was dangerous. The transmission kept slipping and I was terrified. Then we stayed for two-and-a-half weeks in the basement of someone’s house in St. Paul. There were 10 of us sleeping on the floor of this small room. The carpet was covered in cat pee. For dinner, we ate stale bagels that someone got from the bagel store.”

Ross-Smith wanted to leave, but was persuaded to stay and go door-knocking. One day, she says, she raised $140, but quickly realized she’d have trouble collecting the extra US$6,000 required for her volunteer work in Guatemala.

“I couldn’t bring myself to beg any longer for this disgusting outfit” she says. “So they asked me to go around to universities and colleges and put up Humana posters. I felt like a sneak, going into these places without permission and sticking these posters inside bathrooms. I hope no one saw them.”

Last fall, she decided to return home after completing less than half of the training program. IICD promised to refund the balance of her fee, but she’s still waiting.

Charity collected $1.7M, gave $0

Planet Aid claimed $350,000 in losses from 1998 to 2000

Toronto Star, Friday 26th April 2002

by Robert Cribb, Staff Reporter

A non-profit organization that pledges to support overseas development didn’t direct a cent of the first $1.7 million it raised toward humanitarian efforts.

Planet Aid Canada, a Toronto-based charitable clothing operation with three stores and nearly 200 donation bins across the GTA, received the money and donations between 1998 and 2000, largely from people who believed they were helping clothe the poor in places such as India and Africa.

Yet none of that money left Canada. In those three years, the charity claimed total net losses of nearly $350,000.

“We couldn’t (contribute to overseas development projects),” said Carsten Hansen, president of Planet Aid Canada, whose stated purpose is “defeating poverty by undertaking development projects in the Third World.”

“Our charity is not funded by big corporations or government funding. We’re working in plain market conditions. You don’t get anything for free in this world. Nobody expects to make anything significant in the first couple of years. After that, we thought we’d have enough going for us, but it wasn’t possible.”

According to its charity filings with the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, Planet Aid Canada declared the losses as a result of expenses including management, administration and the cost of acquiring its used clothing.

In 2001, for which no official filing has been made, Hansen said his charity turned a profit and gave $30,000 to two development projects in Zambia.

“We decided to keep on struggling and get back up and we have done that. We still have debt, but we’re getting over it.”

Carl Juneau, director of policy and communications with the federal government’s Charities Directorate, said generally speaking, deficit figures such as those filed by Planet Aid raise questions about how well a charity is run.

“It speaks to how efficiently the organization is operating,” he said. “A charity operating at that kind of deficit is probably in fairly serious trouble in terms of its operating capabilities.”

Questions about Planet Aid’s finances in Canada mirror similar questions being asked about the organization’s affiliates around the world.

Planet Aid is part of a complicated international organization of schools, factories, plantations, farms and other clothing recycling operations informally dubbed Tvind after the Dutch area where its founders first came together in the early ’70s.

Tvind’s vast array of non-profit organizations prompted police and governments in Europe to investigate how its charitable revenue is collected and spent. These probes recently led to the arrest and detainment of the organization’s leader, Morgens Amdi Petersen, on charges of tax fraud and embezzlement of millions of dollars.

The Tvind movement comprises dozens of organizations in 55 countries producing millions of dollars in profit, according to a Danish police report on Tvind released last year.

The report alleged tax fraud and said the organization has been “misappropriating funds earmarked for public utility (humanitarian) purposes.” Tvind is a “hierarchically built association with clear political aims,” “has made no allocations to (humanitarian) purposes,” and has enjoyed tax-privileged contributions based on “incorrect, incomplete or misleading information” provided to tax authorities in Denmark, the report reads.

Some Torontonians who went overseas to work on humanitarian projects run by Tvind’s Humana People to People network, which includes Planet Aid Canada, say there’s little evidence that used clothing sales are helping the world’s poor.

“I didn’t really feel like I helped people,” says Ellen Shifrin, a Toronto teacher who spent six months doing development work in India. “They take a group of young people who want to do something good, who are enthusiastic, creative and energetic and turn them into disillusioned, cynical people.”

Nick Moss Gillespie, a Torontonian who spent a year training and working in a Tvind development project in Angola in 1996, says it took him two years after he got home to recover from the guilt of failing to help Africans.

“We invested a year of our lives and a lot of energy and significant personal risk to accomplish something and we were severely underutilized,” he says.

“Our money and the money of the project and money from any funders was not being put to good use at all. The money for a project to build 124 latrines didn’t come through until just six weeks before the end of my stay. The reality is, this isn’t a charity, it’s an international business. It exists to perpetuate itself rather than to have an impact on the local people in Angola.”

Volunteers say there should be no shortage of money for development projects considering the amounts they provide themselves.

Before going overseas, volunteers on Humana projects first spent about 5 1/2five months training in schools run by the Institute for International Co-operation and Development, which supplies volunteers for Humana projects.

Trainees pay $3,300 (U.S.) in tuition and are then expected to raise another $5,600 (U.S.) by soliciting donations door to door, on university campuses or on the streets of U.S. cities.

“I’ve researched dozens of volunteer programs and if you look at the training students are receiving in IICD schools, it’s a scam,” says Zahara Heckscher, co-author of How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas and one of the first volunteers to travel to Africa with the institute in 1987.

“My estimate is that they’re skimming off $3,000 to $5,000 per volunteer above and beyond the real cost of the program. It doesn’t add up for the service they’re offering.”

Line Henricksen, director of the institute’s Michigan facility, said tuition costs and money earned by volunteers through fundraising are “reasonable.”

“If you sat down and made a reasonable budget, you’d see that it’s not overly a big amount of money.”

Sara Somerset, a 22-year-old Torontonian, who recently spent three months at the institute’s Michigan school, said she doesn’t understand why she had to raise $5,600 considering she received no real training.

“They had this self-study program, but everyone stopped doing it after a week and a half because it was bogus…. And they said there was this big database of information, but nobody ever saw it. The language training was terrible. People just e-mailed all day and watched TV.”

Volunteers such as Somerset say school leaders told them money they raise through solicitation goes to fund the organization’s training schools, not overseas projects. Her work as a fundraiser left her feeling increasingly guilty about her involvement with the organization.

“I thought the money was going to the projects … I hadn’t realized it was all going to the school. I would go door to door and canvass on campuses. I emptied out so many students’ wallets … I was taking these people’s money and I just didn’t want to do it any more. I was crying because I didn’t want anyone to give me money any more. I felt really horrible.”

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