Charles Windsor’s charities have suffered another blow with the closing of his Foundation for Integrated Health following the arrest of a former employee in a fraud investigation.
The Foundation was set up by Mr. Windsor to promote homeopathy. Using his official status as a “prince” the organisation was able to obtain both influence in the National Health Service and tax-payers’ money that is unlikely to have been otherwise available.
Windsor’s “private secretary” and former charity chairperson Michael Peat used Windsor’s status to put pressure on charity critic Prof. Edzard Ernst, by making representations to his employer, the University of Exeter. Another Foundation trustee later said that the professor “condemns us to being slaves of population-based statistical totalitarianism”.
The Financial Times quoted Sense About Science UK director Ellen Raphael as welcoming the end of the Foundation. She accused Windsor of “interference in policy” and of restricting “the development of evidence-based medicine”.
The downfall of the charity began when auditors queried its accounts. Subsequently the police made two arrests on suspicion of fraud and money laundering. The accounts for 2007 show an operating deficit of £62,000.
Another of Mr. Windsor’s charities, The Foundation for the Built Environment, was criticised last year for its involvement with Windsor’s interference in the redevelopment of the Chelsea Barracks site in London. The man born to be head of state used his relationship with the feudal rulers of Qatar to block a plan that featured modern architecture. The land is owned by that country’s sovereign wealth fund.
In 2000 an employment tribunal found that another Windsor charity, the Prince’s Trust, had unfairly sacked an employee. He had complained that he had been picked upon and shunned by other employees because he is black.
A scheme to prepare unemployed young people for work run by the same Trust was found by the Adult Learning Inspectorate in 2004 to be failing to provide useful workplace skills. The inspectors described the training as “inadequate” and “unsatisfactory.”