Carrie Symonds’s zoo charity calls in lawyers to probe finances, writes GUY ADAMS

When Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds decided it was time to administer a shot in the arm to their personal finances, they explored a couple of options.

One, revealed by the Mail this week, was to create a new prime ministerial charity, which would help cover some costs that have left many modern occupants of Downing Street facing cashflow problems.

Donors would, among other things, help to foot the bill for doing up the PM’s residential flat, which allegedly has just been given a makeover with some £200,000-worth of ‘gold wall coverings’, intricate textiles and items of chic rattan furniture inspired by a posh interior designer called Lulu Lytle.

A second necessary step, given Johnson’s hugely expensive divorce and the (temporary) abandonment of his lucrative careers in journalism and public speaking, was for No 10 to become a dual-income household. In other words, Carrie would be going back to work.

She would not, of course, be able to take any paid role in her old field of politics without sparking endless disputes about nepotism. And a move into either lobbying or commerce would create a conflict-of-interest minefield. But working for a well-meaning charity? That would certainly pass the smell test.

So it was that she decided to join the payroll of the Aspinall Foundation, a non-profit organisation that runs a couple of popular wildlife parks in Kent.

Her role, as communications director on what I am told is a ‘medium to high five-figure’ salary, was expected to focus on promoting the organisation’s largely well-regarded conservation schemes.

Over the years, the foundation has become expert at reintroducing captive animals to wild ecosystems where they have become endangered.

Last year, it flew a pair of cheetahs, Saba and Nairo, from the UK to South Africa. Carrie knew the duo well, having been photographed meeting them with her new boss, the socialite Damian Aspinall, last year. She wore a cheetah-print headband.

Yet the course of public life rarely runs smooth, especially for a PM’s spouse.

Weeks after taking the job — her first since the birth of ten-month-old son Wilf — she finds herself bogged down in a toxic PR war of the sort you might expect to find on the grubby front line of politics.

Last month, the Mail revealed that her glamorous new employer is being investigated by the Charity Commission over what the regulator calls its ‘financial management and wider governance’.

The news emerged after we shed light on a string of questionable monetary links between the charity and its chairman Mr Aspinall, whose late father John (an old gambling buddy of Lord Lucan’s) was the organisation’s founder.

Among other things, the foundation chooses to rent Damian his country home, a 30-room stately pile in rural Kent, for just £2,500 a month. It has also funnelled hundreds of thousands of pounds to his family.

Damian’s wife, Victoria, was paid £62,000 for ‘interior design services’ by the charity in the past couple of years, while he appears to have been allowed to use its coffers as a sort of piggy-bank, running up an annual debt of £113,122 in 2019.

The previous year, his debt to the charity was £88,783; in 2017 the figure was £58,783; in 2016 it was £28,484. In 2015 he owed £19,208 and in 2014, £47,655. The charity has not said why it extended this credit to Mr Aspinall, or whether he was charged interest. Neither is it willing to comment on how the debts were built up, apart from insisting they are not ‘loans’ and have been completely paid off.

A sister organisation gives his wealthy stepmother a ‘pension’ of £30,000 a year.

These are, on the surface, odd practices, since charities, which receive extensive tax breaks, are required to be very careful indeed about who benefits from their activities and how much they are paid. What’s more, trustees and their dependants are not normally allowed to benefit personally from their role.

With that in mind, the Charity Commission has launched what it calls a ‘regulatory compliance case’. Today, I can reveal two more unusual developments.

First, it has emerged that fundraising for Carrie’s free-spending employer is being run by a former gambling industry executive. His salary makes him quite the high roller: it appears to be roughly £230,000 a year. More on this later.

In a second piece of ominous news, I can disclose that the Charity Commission’s compliance staff aren’t the only ones now asking awkward questions about the Aspinall Foundation’s unorthodox finances.

For they are now the subject of a second investigation, this time by a leading charity lawyer. Her name is Caroline Russell and she is an expert on ‘trustee disputes and Charity Commission issues’ at a firm called Girlings.

Ms Russell has been commissioned by the foundation’s board of trustees to undertake an independent inquiry to establish whether its affairs are legal. It will focus on the issues raised in the Mail’s recent coverage. ‘No doubt there have been governance process shortcomings,’ confirms one trustee. ‘We have [therefore] engaged a serious lawyer to conduct a thorough review.’

Ms Russell’s investigation will also seek to establish whether the charity’s six-person board of trustees — which appointed Ms Symonds and includes several influential Tory donors — is fit for purpose.

She is expected to ask tough questions about whether current members of the board are capable of holding Mr Aspinall to account.

In the years it has been acting as the wealthy socialite’s landlord, the charity has also been entirely run by his family members and close friends.

Interestingly, given Carrie’s new role, several trustees happen to be patrons of the Prime Minister.

At present, the board consists of Damian’s daughter Tansy; his family friends Ben Goldsmith (the Tory donor and financier son of industrialist Sir James); and Ben’s half-brother Robin Birley (a donor to Boris Johnson whose father, Mark, founded Mayfair nightclub Annabel’s); Charles Filmer (a financial adviser who has looked after the wealth of the Goldsmith family); and hedge fund manager Maarten Petermann.

Former trustees include Ben’s brother Lord (Zac) Goldsmith, a close chum of Carrie’s who is rumoured to have been asked to help fund the recent Downing Street decoration with Boris’s other great patron Lord Bamford.

It’s all very cosy. Or, as one informed source puts it, ‘a sort of family affair’. Friends of several trustees say they agreed to do the job as a ‘favour’ to Damian, thinking it would largely involve helping out with fundraisers.

In fact, a charity trustee has onerous legal responsibilities — including to properly scrutinise its financial affairs.

Failure to fulfil those responsibilities can have serious consequences. In a worst-case scenario, charities that break the rules can be struck off, while board members face the humiliation of being banned from serving as a trustee.

All this explains the board’s decision to hire Ms Russell: trustees want to establish what, if any, laws might have been broken.

‘They aren’t publicly criticising Damian because they haven’t fallen out with him,’ says an insider. ‘Before they do anything like that, they need to find out what has actually gone on. It’s their fiduciary duty to know what is happening, and they don’t want to come out and either attack or defend Damian without first getting to the absolute truth of what he’s done on their watch and whether it is legal.

‘There are always grey areas in the law and they need a specialist to tell them what the precedents are and where the charity stands. You could argue that they should have done this ages ago, and that’s a fair point. But in asking a qualified person to look into this they are now doing exactly the right thing.’

The fallout of any investigation, however, could not only disrupt the cosy ‘family’ arrangements but also have serious political ramifications. For example, Ben Goldsmith is a board member of Defra, thanks largely to the patronage of Boris Johnson.

Somewhat controversially, he and brother Zac, who is a Defra minister and close ally of Carrie, now have an extraordinary influence over environmental policy.

At times, they have worked with the Prime Minister’s consort to promote causes such as ‘re-wilding’, a subject reportedly close to Carrie’s heart. Carrie and Zac have also been instrumental in seeking to end the practice of culling badgers to control bovine tuberculosis. This has made enemies of the farming lobby and other noisy Tory factions.

‘People are already out to get Ben,’ points out one prominent rural lobbyist. ‘Now, if he is found by the regulator to have failed to properly oversee a small animal charity, people will ask should he be trusted to oversee the British farming and food industries. It’s a reasonable question and it will be impossible to answer.’

Dealing with incoming fire related to this potentially unedifying affair is surely not what Ms Symonds signed up to when she took on the role, which for now is being performed from a flat above Downing Street.

And, of course, there could be further ugly headlines to come.

Last year’s audited accounts for the foundation are, I gather, about to be circulated to trustees.

In the meantime, questions are also being asked about the remuneration of the executive in charge of fundraising for the foundation.

Tony Kelly is a former gambling industry figure who until 2018 was running the Hong Kong Jockey Club.

He left that role suddenly for what were described as ‘personal reasons’ in early 2018, before returning to the UK.

A year later, he was unveiled as managing director of Howletts and Port Lympne Estates Limited, the company which runs the foundation’s parks.

Although his predecessor earned £84,037 a year, accounts for 2019 show that Mr Kelly earned £152,110 in the remaining eight months of the year after he took office. That translates to a salary of £228,000 a year.

Asked to explain why the foundation appears to employ the best-paid zookeeper in Britain, a spokesman for Howletts and Port Lympne Estates said Mr Kelly was recruited by an external agency and that his salary was ‘benchmarked’ to reflect his ‘calibre and proven track record heading up our commercial operations’, which include running ‘luxury 400-bed overnight accommodation’ at the two wildlife parks.

The salary is not paid by the charity but by the company, the spokesman added.

Unusually, however, Mr Kelly has repeatedly been described as the Aspinall Foundation’s ‘managing director’ in corporate communications. Including, last May, in a press release by Barclays bank, when it issued the charity with a ‘business interruption loan’ to help survive lockdown.

Around the same time, he appeared on LBC radio to solicit charitable donations from listeners. Again, he was described as the Aspinall Foundation’s ‘managing director’ before going on to issue a heart-rending appeal for money.

‘There’s no shareholders in our organisation. Nobody makes any money out of it,’ he declared.

Of course, that wasn’t entirely true. For not one, but two ongoing inquiries are now taking a close look at the fact that a small number of people appear to be doing very well indeed out of the animal charity.

Would the Great British public be quite so inclined to dig deep if they knew that the man rattling the tin was earning £230,000?

Or that the charity they were supporting rents a Palladian mansion to its founder’s son for the same rate that a terraced home fetches in nearby Canterbury?

It is, as they say, a hornet’s nest. And as awkward questions pile up in her inbox, Ms Symonds could be forgiven for wondering if there might have been easier ways to pay for a Downing Street makeover.