Hare coursing, once a legal “field sport” has been taken over by criminal gangs since being made illegal by the 2004 Hunting Act.

The gangs operate mainly in Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk and set a number of starved dogs after a hare, which is torn to pieces when caught. The film of the chase is then played in pubs around the country with the gangs offering betting on the outcome of which dog gets to the hare first.

A recent increase in hare-coursing has been blamed on the closure of a special five-person police unit set up to deal with the illegal meetings.

Paul Kelly, formerly Asda’s vice president for corporate affairs faces jail after admitting seven counts of fraud at Leeds Crown Court. (Business Desk)

Kelly (55) admitted that he diverted £180,000 from Asda’s charity fund to the MurleyDance ballet company, also a charity, run by his partner Paul Murley (35) Kelly used his position as chairman of the supermarket’s charity foundation to divert money purportedly being used to help flood victims to the ballet company.

Kelly, who parted company with Asda when the fraud was discovered by his employer in September 2014, was also an ambassador for Prince Charles’s Business in the Community charity. He is expected to be sentenced later this month.

A donation to charity in place of a gift is around a quarter less acceptable than some donors think.

This has emerged in a study at the University of Southern California where 151 people were asked to either make a £25 donation to charity on behalf of a friend or give them a gourmet coffee hamper to the same value. The givers and receivers were then asked to rate the present in terms of overall appreciation, offensiveness, commitment to the friendship and thoughtfulness.

Recipients were up to 27% less appreciative of the charity donations than the givers expected, and their expectation of thoughtfulness at 74% was higher than the actual figure of 48% recorded.

It transpired that the virtuous identity bought by the giver by the charity donation was only really of value to the giver and not the receiver.

The founder of a UN-backed charity formed to combat trafficking of footballer is being investigated for trafficking.

It is alleged that former Cameroon player Jean-Claude Mbvoumin of the charity Foot Solidaire took more than £2,000 from a young Japanese hopeful for accommodation, travel and trials at top French club Angiers. However it is alleged that no trials paid for ever took place, and that a £350 fee paid for a five-star hotel room in Geneva got the 20 year-old hopeful a two bedded room in a four-star hotel, that he had to share with three others.

The allegations have been made in a new book The Lost Boys: Inside Football’s Slave Trades by Ed Hawkins. The investigation is being run by, er, Fifa

Free canapes and sparkling wine on arrival are two of the inducements being offered to charities booking events at the Stadium of Light Sunderland football club before the end of March.

Other components of the Charity Event Offer are professional photography, appearances by former SAFC players, money-cant-buy signed merchandise and incentives to use the Hilton Garden Inn Hotel, opening next to the stadium in April.

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Greed might work for Wall Street but it is not an attractive, nor appropriate, option for the third sector.

The Times newspaper has just published its first analysis of charity pay, said to average a modest £20,000 a year for most employees. However a few charity trustees are allowing their chief and senior executives to significantly line their pockets, with more than 1,000 of them trousering at least £100,000 a year, with some of those grabbing considerably more, and more than enough to bring the sector into the disrepute warned of by the Charity Commission. Continue reading →

A former employee of fundraising firm Wesser has alleged that the company deliberately targets elderly and vulnerable people living alone for donations, and pockets 45 pence for every pound collected from donors in their first two years of donations.

Following the allegations published in The Sun newspaper St John Ambulance, Wesser’s largest client, has suspended its dealings with them while it carries out its own investigation. Continue reading →

The chairman of the trustees of the collapsed Kids Company charity, Alan Yentob has resigned his £183.000 job as creative director of the BBC, saying that the furore in the wake of the August collapse was proving a “serious distraction”.

Yentob was widely blamed for his part, as trustee’s chairman, in the financial failure of the charity, which had received £46 million in public funding. He was also hit by media allegations that he misused his power at the BBC, asking Newsnight to delay a critical report into the charity. Continue reading →

The RSPCA has said it will stop bringing private prosecutions for cruelty against huntsmen, on the advice of a former employee of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

Instead it will pass any evidence it collects to the police, trading standards or CPS.

A study found that four out of five attempts to prosecute hunts failed.