Charity hit by scam

AS much as €100,000 may have been stolen from the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation (CNCF) in a carefully engineered scam at its Dublin office.

The robbery is the subject of a Garda Fraud Squad investigation which has already established that €60,000 was siphoned from the charity’s coffers over a three-year period. This figure, some sources believe, could climb to considerably more than that once the garda probe is completed.

An employee at the CNCF Dublin office has been suspended.

The charity’s award-winning founder, Christina Noble, who is in Vietnam working with a medical team, said: “The misappropriation of funds that occurred is a travesty for the many impoverished children in Vietnam and Mongolia, for whom these funds were generated, as well as for those who have given so generously of their time and resources to raise money.

“The board and I have co-operated fully with the relevant authorities to ensure that those involved will be brought to justice.

“On behalf of the board and myself, I wish to convey my sincere regret that this deceitful, premeditated and carefully concealed fraud occurred in our Dublin office. I am devastated with what has happened.”

Ms Noble is well-known in many countries including Australia, Britain, the US and all over Asia, as a tireless fundraiser for homeless Vietnamese and Mongolian children.

She had already opened offices in 14 other countries before 1998, when President Mary McAleese officiated at the opening of the foundation’s first Irish branch in Dublin.

That same office in Christ Church is now the focus of the probe into a scam which went undetected by the charity’s own auditors or bankers until gardaí were called in by the CNCF last year to investigate possible fraud.

Lax banking procedures were thought to have contributed to at least some of the fraudulent transactions. Yesterday, one of the charity’s directors, Lillian Harris, said the charity had undergone a major root and branch review of procedures especially with regard to the handling of donations.

Ms Noble runs a medical centre for abandoned and malnourished children in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon.

Ms Noble was born in the Dublin slums in 1944.

When Christina was 10, her mother died and she and her three siblings were split up and sent to a separate orphanages.

She spent four years institutionalised in the west of Ireland, believing her brother and sisters to be dead, before escaping back to Dublin to live on the streets. She was gang raped, became pregnant and had a baby boy who was taken for adoption against her will.

At the age of 18 she ran away to join her brother in England, where she later married and had three children. Over the next decade she endured domestic abuse, was beaten, miscarried, suffered bouts of depression and a nervous breakdown.

In the early 1970s, as the Vietnam War dragged on, she had a dream. In it, the children of Vietnam begged her for help.

In 1989, still haunted by that dream, she finally arrived in Ho Chi Minh city to set up her Children’s Foundation to help children in need of medical care and protection from exploitation.