Jimbo's financial irregularities?, merged with "WMF finances" Options

[dogbiscuit]

In amongst the tittle-tattle, there have been some bits and pieces popping out about how Jimbo has been misusing WMF funds and failing to keep proper account of his spending. It is rather reminiscent of that felon employee and the "no money is missing, but if it is, I'll pay it back myself" approach.

It would be a shame to have the proper exposure of these serious, potentially criminal activities covered up by Jimbo's mid-life crisis. What do we have courtesy of Danny?

• WMF funding private expenses of Jimbo without any apparent control of his expenditure in advance.
• Jimbo reimbursing inappropriate expenditure via a donation rather than a direct payment.
• The suggestion that the reimbursement value was negotiated, rather than properly backed up by receipts. If this is the case, was the WMF in reality properly reimbursed?
• If there have been substantial amounts ($30,000) owning for several months, then surely a charity should be reimbursed for the interest lost due to offering unauthorised free loans. These are not trivial amounts of money, and Jimbo should be repaying several thousand dollars for this.
• We are also aware that Wikia Inc activities have been performed while Jimbo is on tour financed by WMF. How has Wikia Inc. reimbursed the WMF for its proportion of the costs?
• I'm not sure of his point, but Danny seems to suggest that some payments that Jimbo took (honorariums), rightly belonged to the WMF - the "gold washing machine".

I think if I was the auditor of the WMF, I'd be rather nervous of my professional standing. We are told, by Jimbo, that all these indiscretions are in the past, but as the auditing process did not make these issues public, did not qualify the accounts or bring these to the attention of the public, we simply wonder what other issues are lurking to be found out. Jimbo does not have any moral concerns about abusing the charity status of the WMF, as he does not generally seem to be troubled by morals.

I should think Jimbo will have a busy couple of days getting his expense claims squeaky clean. once he has finished dealing with his other dirty laundry.

I'm pretty sure that in the UK the charity commission would be breathing all over him by now. Time for Jimbo to step down from WMF.

This post has been edited by dogbiscuit: Mon 3rd March 2008, 10:12am

[Somey]

There's a lot of disappointing schaudenfreude on this website at the moment.

I'd hardly call it schadenfreude... If anything, I suspect most of us are quite envious of Jimbo's ability to use his position on a mere website to score with hot right-wing media babes.

And have you ever asked yourself why there aren't more left-wing media babes? Like, maybe the same reason why so many media figures tagged as "liberal" are actually comedians? Think about it.

Are you willing to state unequivocally that Jimmy Wales never wrote a check to the WMF to reimburse the WMF for his personal expenses?

I'm not sure I'm following this - is he saying that it would have been wrong for Jimbo to reimburse the foundation for such expenditures, or that he had been compelled to do so (for whatever reason) and Sue Gardner has been effectively denying it? Presumably the latter, right?

Given that Jimbo has traditionally kept the fees received from his speaking engagements and other personal appearances for himself, while insisting that others (such as Angela) turn theirs over to the foundation, I'd have to say that he really should bear all the expenses incurred from travel to and from speaking engagements. Sex romps with former BLP victims are a different story, though... The foundation should definitely pay for those, I would think. Why else would you have a foundation in the first place, if not to pay for things like that?

[UserB]

I'm not sure I'm following this - is he saying that it would have been wrong for Jimbo to reimburse the foundation for such expenditures, or that he had been compelled to do so (for whatever reason) and Sue Gardner has been effectively denying it? Presumably the latter, right?

The foundation never should have paid any of his personal expenses to begin with. So if he is reimbursing the foundation, then something bad happened somewhere along the line. That's what Danny is getting at, I think.