Trustees of the Presidents Club charity, which hosted a gala dinner where female staff were allegedly groped and propositioned for sex, gave little thought to the women’s welfare while they took “careful steps” to protect the identity of male guests, according to a report by the Charity Commission.
The regulator said trustees breached their legal duties by failing to address the risk to the charity’s reputation posed by staging an all-male event at which female hostesses were instructed to wear “sexy” clothes. The report revealed that the Presidents Club, which gives donations collected from members to good causes, paid for the women’s dresses, although they were reused each year to cut costs.
While trustees acknowledged they “had not moved with the times”, according to the report, they “saw nothing wrong” with demanding that 130 female staff wear the uniform.
They were also found to have not done enough to prevent staff being harassed or to have investigated the allegations properly afterwards.
“The trustees thought insufficiently about the welfare of the women hired to work at their charity’s event while taking careful steps to protect the privacy of the male guests attending the dinner,” said the regulator’s chief executive, Helen Stephenson.
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