Local newspaper Scotland on Sunday quoted Jean McFadden, a charity law expert from Strathclyde University, saying: "It seemed to me that it simply grew too big for a small group of volunteers to handle and not get out of their depth".
[1] The Moonbeams charity was founded in 1992 by former postal worker Willie Power, two years after the death from cancer of his 11-year-old daughter, Gayle.
[2] The charity was well-known locally for raising funds by selling sweets,[3] and was dedicated to helping children with cancer and their families.
This is a common and legitimate arrangement, which allows the charity effectively to trade commercially without breaking the rules associated with its charitable status.
[7] In lodging the petition, the SCO made a number of allegations concerning the running of the Moonbeams charity and trading company.
As the directors of the charity did not answer the petition by the court deadline,[8] their responses to these allegations can be surmised only from a small number of interviews given to local media.
[2] Although these figures might be reasonable for a normal commercial company, they were received with surprise by Moonbeams supporters, who had purchased the goods in the expectation that a far greater proportion of the selling price would reach the charity.
The reason for this was that the lawyers, Lindsays, recommended setting up the trading arm to absorb all the costs of the charity, including the salaries of all employees.
Willie Power, the founder of Moonbeams, was criticized by local media for demanding £3,000 in salary to cover the period immediately prior to the charity's collapse.
[2] In November 2007, four years after the collapse of Moonbeams, Gary Easton made a voluntary agreement to repay an undisclosed portion of the £93,000 he had received from the charity in professional fees.
Most notably, earlier in 2003, the directors and trustees of Breast Cancer Research (Scotland) had been similarly suspended by the Court of Session—again following the discovery that only a small fraction of its income had funded charitable objectives.
[16] Much of the blame was laid on the weak Scottish regulatory framework, which was (and remains) entirely separate from the system overseen by the Charity Commission for England and Wales.
At the time there was no requirement for charities to submit annual accounts, or even to register unless they wished to claim tax benefits.
Quoted in Scotland on Sunday, the chair of the commission, Jean McFadden, said: "Our report seemed to disappear into a great black hole and nothing much happened.