Prince Harry charity insiders reveal cash worries at Sentebale

Financial worries and disagreements about fundraising helped inflame the row that has engulfed the charity founded by Prince Harry, insiders close to former trustees told BBC News.

An acrimonious boardroom battle has seen Prince Harry, his co-founder Prince Seeiso of Lesotho and trustees resign from their roles at the charity and insiders claimed personality clashes and tensions around leadership of the charity added to Sentebale’s challenges.

The financial fears were despite the charity receiving an extra £1.2m from Prince Harry’s earnings from his best-selling memoir Spare.

Sentebale said it had successfully hired consultants to find new US donors – and the one-off money from Spare was “incredibly useful” but did not represent a long-term “funding pipeline”.

The claims and counter-claims over Sentebale are set to be examined by the Charity Commission, which will have to decide whether to escalate the concerns to a full statutory inquiry.

The watchdog is likely to hear financial concerns from former trustees, who resigned earlier this month after the chair Sophie Chandauka refused to step down.

“It is devastating that the relationship between the charity’s trustees and the chair of the board broke down beyond repair, creating an untenable situation,” said a statement from those trustees leaving the charity.

Among the likely claims are that £500,000 of Sentebale’s money was spent on consultants in a strategy to get donations from wealthy individuals and foundations in the US, but which sources close to former trustees say had not delivered results.

Insiders say that if the US fundraising strategy had worked this crisis in running the charity might have been averted.

Ms Chandauka has widely used the title “Dr” both for the Sentebale charity and other business settings. This is a reference to an honorary award from Coventry University and is not an academic or medical qualification.

A spokeswoman for Sentebale told the BBC that the use of “Dr” was a “matter of personal choice” and there was “no legal restriction preventing honorary degree recipients from using the title”.

A Sentebale spokeswoman rejected the claim that £500,000 had been spent on US consultants – and defended its approach to seeking new funds for a charity.

The charity told the BBC that it had hired a US firm called Lebec to help build a new fundraising strategy, and that by October 2024 a team of six consultants had set up 65 key relationships with potential donors, who might help Sentebale in the future.

It said the 12-month deal with Lebec, a women-led strategy firm, had successfully delivered links to “high-net-worth individuals, family offices, corporations, foundations and partner non-profits”.

The charity said it was important for Sentebale to “build credibility” in the US and that the project had “successfully delivered against every deliverable”.

The shift to larger-scale US funding would appear to be a different style of approach from Sentebale’s fundraising polo matches and celebrity events associated with Prince Harry.

Prince Harry, his co-founder Prince Seeiso of Lesotho and trustees resigned from their roles at Sentebale, as a “result of our loss in trust and confidence in the chair of the board”.

They left a charity which was set up in 2006 to help young people in southern Africa living with HIV and Aids, a project which had strong emotional ties for Prince Harry and the legacy of his mother Princess Diana.

Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso said they were resigning from the charity with “heavy hearts”.

Insiders say that relationships had been “fraught” by last autumn.

The trustees’ walkout followed Ms Chandauka’s refusal to step down as chair – and she responded with her own claims against her former colleagues.

She accused Prince Harry of trying to oust her and said she had raised her concerns with the Charity Commission, with a “whistleblower complaint about the bullying, the harassment and the misogyny”.

Ms Chandauka argued that the controversy around Prince Harry leaving the UK had meant that he had become a barrier to funding from donors.

“It was pretty obvious to me that we had lost quite a number of corporate sponsors,” she said in a Sky News interview.

Ms Chandauka also spoke about a dispute over a video at a fundraising polo match, where it had been claimed the Duchess of Sussex was manoeuvring her out of the way during a prize giving.

The body language seemed to be a sign of other tensions.

“Prince Harry asked me to issue some sort of a statement in support of the duchess and I said I wouldn’t,” said Ms Chandauka, who said she did not want the charity to be used as an extension of the publicity for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

There were other tussles over whether Prince Harry had caused disruption by wanting to bring a Netflix TV crew to a fundraising event.

But sources close to those who have left the charity do not accept that version of events.

If the Charity Commission announces it is going ahead with a “regulatory compliance case”, it will gather evidence about the claims over how Sentebale has been managed and will decide whether the investigation needs to be escalated to the next level of a statutory inquiry.

Ms Chandauka has argued that the charity can continue without its founders and needs to change its focus to reflect the current needs in southern Africa. A friend of Prince Harry’s says he feels as though “he’s had one of his fingers cut off”.