Walter Grant's letter

This letter arrived last Thursday via our trusty postman. Once in the dim an distant past he used to arrive before lunch, in spite of numerous invitations to take cups of tea with the ladies of the village. Now he arrives, if we are lucky, somewhere around the one o'clock news. Such is progress.

Walter Grant, for those of you who don't know him, was elected by the Members to the Chairmanship of the Management Board of C.A.T.H. last October. He also acts as Chaplain to the Charity and spent a lot of his previous career in H.M. Submarines. As befits an ex - submariner he is a man of deep convictions and impeccable integrity, someone whose word and judgement I would trust implicitly, so his letter came as a considerable shock.

I have retyped it here, so any errors and omissions from the orignal document are mine. The letter is not dated but since it arrived on the 4th I assume it was sent on the 2nd or 3rd of April 2008.

"From: Walter SB Grant

To: All Members of C.A.T.H.

As you may of heard, I resigned from the post as Chairman of the Board of Trustees on the 11th of February. Resigning from the post to which I had only been elected last October was a very great personal disappointment to me, but over those few months I had come to realise that I was increasingly at odds with the actions of the rest of the Board, and that resigning as Chairman was the only alternative to becoming implicated in these actions and their consequences.

The events of these months will soon become public knowledge, although your Board has carefully kept them from you until now, as they have the fact that the Board of Trustees of C.A.T.H. is now under investigation by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (O.S.C.R.) for, amongst other things, misuse or mis-application of the Charity's funds.

O.S.C.R. has wide-ranging powers of intervention, interdiction and referral and can appoint a judicial factor, appoint trustees, suspend or remove any person concerned in the management of the Charity, freeze the assets of the Charity and if necessary refer the matter for further action, for example in the case of fraud. The serious consequences for C.A.T.H. should O.S.C.R. decide to take any of these steps could, and should have, been avoided and I hold myself partly responsible for not being able to do so in the face of a Board conflicted in interest but united in a determination to expensively proceed on a route down which they were advised not to go by both myself and your Chief Executive, Kath Critchley; advice which was given in anticipation of the serious potential consequences of just such an investigation that the Charity now finds itself under.

Whatever the result of the O.S.C.R. investigation, it is clear to me the governance and long term health of C.A.T.H. can only be ensured by a complete change of Board membership. To this end, I and a few other concerned members will be calling for an Extraordinary General Meeting as urgently as possible to elect a new Board. Until then, I am still a member of the Board and will continue to attend meetings in spite of being ostracized by the rest of the Directors when I do so.

I hope we will have your support at the E.G.M. meeting to save C.A.T.H.

Yours sincerely

Walter Grant"


Obviously this raises an awful lot of questions. Rather than attempt to list them or answer them here, I suggest you read on to the next post before responding.