Luxury hotel and spa fees: British top model Naomi Campbell was sanctioned for her excessive spending in the management of her anti-poverty association “Fashion for relief”.
The UK regulator banned him from running a charity for five years.
“I am extremely concerned. We are investigating on our side, because I did not have control of my charitable organization, I had entrusted it to a lawyer,” the 54-year-old model defended herself on Thursday from Paris, where she was decorated with the order of Arts and Letters by the Minister of Culture Rachida Dati.
A few hours earlier, an investigation by the British regulator, Charity Commission, revealed that only 8.5% of its organization’s overall spending, intended to fight poverty, had been devoted to charitable grants between April 2016 and July 2022.
Among the expenses highlighted: a plane ticket of 12,300 pounds (or 14,800 euros) from London to Nice to transfer works of art and jewelry to a fundraising event in Cannes in 2018.
Or even a five-star hotel bill, amounting to 7,800 pounds (or 9,400 euros) for three nights. The total bill included spa fees, room service and the purchase of cigarettes and hotel products.
“Blood Diamonds”
The regulator’s incriminations do not stop there.
It also points to payments totaling 290,000 pounds (or 348,000 euros) for consulting services for the benefit of an administrator, which was contrary to the statutes of the charitable organization and constitutes “bad management” of the association’s funds.
The administrators did not, at any time, “review the operating model of the association to ensure that the fundraising methods were in the interest of the association and that the costs were reasonable”, criticizes- he.
As a result, “Fashion for relief” was removed from the register of charities and the top model was deprived of the right to run a charity for five years.
Born in May 1970 in London, Naomi Campbell’s name is inseparable from that of fashion history.
She was the first black model to appear on the cover of British Vogue at the age of 20, before walking all over the world’s catwalks with Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Eva Herzigova, known as “supermodels” in the 1990s.
The model’s influence on the global fashion industry has never faded over the years, despite the scandals.
Among those who tainted his image, the so-called “blood diamonds”. Naomi Campbell admitted to having received rough diamonds from former Liberian president Charles Taylor, convicted of crimes against humanity committed during the civil war in Sierra Leone.
Known for her angry and violent temperament, she was sentenced in 2007 to five days of community service in New York for throwing her phone at an assistant.
A year later, she was arrested after an altercation with a police officer at Heathrow Airport, which was then experiencing significant disruption.
