Two charities set up in Jimmy Savile’s name are to close, they have confirmed.
The Leeds-based Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust and the Jimmy Savile Stoke Mandeville Hospital Trust will cease operation, from today.
The £5.3m in both accounts will be distributed to other charities, which will not be named.
The trustees, who met yesterday, (Oct 22) felt the charities would always be linked in people’s minds with the late presenter, who is at the centre of sex abuse allegations.
The decision to close both organisations was taken with “great sadness”, they said.
But, the primary concern was to protect the charitable causes they support and a continued focus by the media on the two bodies was “potentially damaging” to their beneficiaries.
The identity of those receiving money from the two charities would not be publicised and it would be up to each recipient to decide whether to make public any donation, bosses said.
In a statement they said that no future requests for funding from the charitable organisations would be considered, they confirmed.
A statement issued today said: “The trustees have, with great sadness, therefore decided to take steps to bring both charities to an end. They will be talking to the charitable beneficiaries that
they have committed to support, as well as to the Charity Commission, to ensure that this is done in the most sensitive and appropriate way.
“The trustees have already chosen how to distribute the funds in each charity and have decided not to publicly announce who the recipients will be.
“It will be for each charitable organisation to decide whether to publicise any donation received. No future requests for funding will be considered.”
On the Charity Commission’s website, the body states that the trust’s objectives were to “provide funds for the relief of poverty and sickness and other charitable purposes beneficial to the community”, as well as “provision of recreational and other facilities for disabled persons.”
The Jimmy Savile Stoke Mandeville Hospital Trust was set up in 1981, following a request from the Buckinghamshire hospital where he volunteered for many years to help raise funds for rebuilding work. He raised £20m in total to build the Stoke Mandeville Spinal Injuries Unit..
The charitable trust’s latest accounts, filed with the Charity Commission in March, showed it had funds totalling £3.7m in 2011/12. It had an income of £132,546 and spent £43,866 in the same year.
The Stoke Mandeville charity had funds of £1.7m, according to the Charity Commission files.
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