The dodgy history of Belinda’s Knight Foundation

The other day, while we were working on the FAQ about those who planned and executed the Hampstead SRA hoax, we were reminded that Belinda McKenzie’s created her alleged ‘charity’, the Knight Foundation, to act as a receptacle for donations to the hoax. We wondered: how has this non-charity been faring lately?

Some readers will remember that in 2015 Belinda faced some rather pointed questions about the charitable status of the Knight Foundation.

In fact, having already been struck off by the Charities Commission for her dodgy behaviour regarding the multi-million pound charity, Iran Aid, Belinda found herself once more under investigation by the Commission for falsely claiming that the Knight Foundation was a charity.

According to the Ham&High, which covered the story in July 2015:

The Charity Commission is investigating claims that a Highgate-based organisation has been masquerading as a charity – including revelations that it sent almost all its donations to a fugitive wanted for questioning by police.

An investigation by the Ham&High has discovered that a company claiming to raise money to help “protect children from sexual abuse” had been misleading potential donors as part of a drive to raise £1million.

The Knight Foundation, set up in February 2014, said the money would go towards helping fight “cruelty against children” and “Satanic ritual abuse”.

But the Ham&High has discovered that the organisation is not registered with the government watchdog the Charity Commission and that almost all the donations received are being sent to Sabine McNeill – a fugitive wanted for questioning by UK police.

Her colleague Belinda McKenzie, one of the directors of The Knight Foundation, has been leading the donation drive from her home in Priory Gardens, Highgate.

The 69-year-old told the Ham&High: “We are aiming to become a charity and are at the early stages of the organisation.

“I see our work as charitable as it’s helping others, including my friend Sabine who had to leave the UK or face arrest. She needs financial support for her work, speaking to MEPs about child abuse in the UK. But I will consider amending the wording on our website.”

…..

The Knight Foundation recently ramped up fundraising efforts, with Ms McKenzie posting messages on the organisation’s website every day for the past three weeks urging those wanting to fight “the very worst kind of child abuse” to donate to the “charity”.

After this newspaper’s findings were passed to the Charity Commission, the regulatory authority confirmed the organisation was not registered and said it had been “misleading” potential donors.

Describing its work as “not wholly charitable”, the Commission added it would also be looking further into the company “to assess if there are any other regulatory concerns”.

(Emphasis ours)

To date, we’ve seen no indication that Belinda has made any attempts to obtain charitable status for her fund-raising organisation, despite her promise as far back as 16 November 2014 that she would be turning it into a charity:

I find money largely boring and am not remotely interested in it, apart from it’s being an indicator of the ebb-and-flow of human psychological compulsion which is a fascinating whole area. But as I’ve discovered painfully this year, lack of money is a serious impediment to being able to help people, especially children, or even being able to move around, hence my public activity has more or less ground to a stop, despite a few friends momentarily pitching in to help, god bless you, your names are inscribed in gold on my heart.

The obvious solution is to SET UP A CHARITY which is what I’m now in the process of doing. After a few months dithering around trying to decide whether I really do want to run a charity? yet another children’s charity, on top of the hundreds already registered with the Charity Commission? I’m going to take the plunge so THE KNIGHT FOUNDATION which is going to be a charity with a difference! will be launched at long last on 30^th November this month in Camden London (see below details of venue & time).

Having announced this to her followers, and then continued the “Knight Foundation charity” ruse as people donated to help fight “cruelty against children” and “Satanic ritual abuse”, it’s not surprising that she managed to dupe people into sending her money via her fake charity.

Last spring we noticed that Belinda had taken down the Knight Foundation website, only to replace it a few weeks later with a new, updated version containing links to some unfamiliar organisations: a technology company based in Salt Lake City, Utah; a reputable wildlife preservation organisation; and a Nottingham-based private company called ‘4Children & Families’.

But for the past several weeks now, the Knight Foundation site has been back ‘under maintenance’.

What is The Knight Foundation really?

We decided to look into things a bit further, and went to have a look at the Companies House page:

First things first: there’s no sign of the Knight Foundation ever having morphed into a charity. It’s quite clearly listed as a “Private Limited Company by guarantee without share capital use of ‘Limited’ exemption”.

Of interest as well is the company’s financial statements: for both 2015 and 2016 fiscal years, the Knight Foundation claims a net worth of £1:

The company is listed as “dormant”: this means that it’s been registered with Companies House but is not carrying on any kind of business activity or receiving any form of income. However, Belinda has on at least one occasion stated that monies raised by the company, on pretence that it was a charity, were actually spent to support Sabine while she was on the run from the authorities during the first half of 2015.

We’re no financial experts, but given Belinda’s various sleights of hand regarding her distinctly non-charitable PLC, we wonder exactly how truthful her records are.

Who’s who at The Knight Foundation?

The Knight Foundation has had a very spotty history of appointments and resignations of its various officers, especially for a company that is only 2 and a half years old:

It seems that Xavier Knight started out as a company director but lasted only a couple of months. Meanwhile, Belinda and her stalwarts Sabine McNeill and Mary Rooney took on directorships. Sabine and Mary had their appointments terminated in May 2015, at the same time that someone named Sharon Spierling and Alexander David Mark Forbes came aboard as directors. Sharon dropped off in August 2015, but Alexander Forbes has remained as a director to date. Meanwhile, though, Belinda struck herself off as director in April 2016.

We were curious about Sharon Spierling and Alex Forbes: Ms Spierling seems to pop up and then vanish again without a trace, but Alex Forbes is friends with Belinda, Pamela Almaz, Caul Grant, and Jake C. on Facebook.

Curiously, he also seems to have attended the trial of William Brian Freeman in May 2015:

“Freeman”, of course, is better known to Hoaxtead watchers as Brian Pead, the children’s counsellor who offered a 14-year-old girl £300 to have sex with him, only to discover that she was in fact an undercover police officer posing as a teen.

Of course it is entirely possible that Alex Forbes knew nothing about Mr Pead’s criminal history, especially since all of Pead’s troofer friends went to such pains to cover it up, claiming that he was a noble whistle-blower who’d been stitched up by the powers that be. Just like all the other convicted paedophiles befriended by those who’ve pushed the Hoaxtead narrative.

Overall, the history of the Knight Foundation looks very dodgy to us. Its connections to various Hoaxtead promoters, its blatantly fraudulent impersonation of a charity, its rapid change-over of directors, its constantly shifting web presence…it just doesn’t add up, does it?