# 204 Bob Tufts, as a CCF board member, would you please answer questions that fellow board members Samuel Robinson & Bob Alexander won't answer?

Dear Bob Tufts

I wrote to you on 17^th Feb this year, in your capacity as a member of the CCF board, with a few questions. You did not answer them.  I have pasted my letter below to refresh your memory.

As you will be aware I have, this past few days, written to fellow board members Samuel Robinson and Bob Alexander – the latter being in the interesting position (to say the least!) of being required as a board member to provide oversight of himself as Chief Operating Officer!

Conflict of interest! What conflict of interest?

If you would care to answer the questions that Samuel and Bob won’t answer, that would be great. You are not going to though, are you? No, you and your fellow board members have decided to hunker down and pretend that all these questions are not coming your way. If you bury your heads in the sand you can pretend the questions were never asked. “Who reads Ricketson’s blog, anyway?” I can hear someone in a board meeting saying. “We can ignore him. Just get James Wright to write an occasional ‘shoot-the-messenger’ comment on his blog, fire up the troops on Khmer440 (“Ricketson is a madman”) and the problem will go away.”

Good luck with that, Bob.

You might be right, though. You and your fellow board members might just get away with answering any questions at all. After all, there is no-one in Cambodia who is going to as them, or even care about the answers. NGOs can be (and are) laws unto themselves.

Scambodia!

And CCF can rest assured that the Cambodian media will ask no questions; do no investigations, so everything is going to be OK, right?

Maybe. I am sure Somaly Mam thought she was going to get away with her lies right up until a serious journalist, working for a serious publication, exposed her as a fraud.

Since I wrote to Bob Alexander I have been informed, by a reasonably reliable source, that the Child Protection Unit receives its funding from a source other than the Cambodian Children’s Fund. Is this correct? If so, then the list I presented to Bob Alexander (Direct Program Expenses) is factually incorrect. The Child Protection Unit can be crossed off it – leaving the Granny program, the Rice Support program and CCF’s medical clinic only.

Does it really cost $2.7 million to run these three programs? Am I missing something. 

How many grannies does CCF support? And what is the extent of the support in financial terms?

There is anecdotal evidence that the Granny program is being cut back? Is this so?

You will ignore all my questions, Bob, of that I can be sure. They will be on file, however, and the option of plausible deniability will not be open to you.

You and your fellow board members have a duty of care not only to the children in CCF care and their families but to the generous sponsors and donors who have a right to expect transparency and accountability from the CCF board.

My letter to you,Bob, from 17^th Feb this year.

# 185 A challenge for Bob Tufts, member of the Cambodian Children's Fund board

Dear Bob Tufts

You are on the Cambodian Children’s Fund board of directors. From what mutual associates have told me, you are a decent man. How, then, can you and your fellow board members continue to turn a blind eye, a deaf ear, to the scams perpetrated by Scott Neeson and the two disgraced Australian Federal Police Officers (one a convicted felon) he has at his side running CCF?

Have you asked Scott who owns the land upon which the World Housing homes ‘gifted’ to poor families are being built? Is it a matter of any concern to you and your fellow board members that Scott has lied to donors and sponsors about who is the ultimate recipient of the ‘gifted’ houses? 

Is it a matter of any concern at all to you and your fellow board members that CCF makes a profit from exploiting the poverty of materially poor families who have children in CCF residential care?

You don’t believe me? OK, fair enough. Would you like to meet some of these families? I can  take you to them and you can ask, yourself, whatever questions you wish to ask. If you do, and if you then check the veracity of the answers you receive, you will, if you have any decency, ask Scott: 

“How can CCF be receiving $150 a month in sponsorship monies per child in residential care ($1,800 a year) whilst the mother of this child earns $1,000 a year working in the Phnom Penh Rubbish Dump to feed her remaining children?"

And what of a mother with two kids in CCF residential care? Three kids? Do the maths, Bob, and then meet the families; see where they live and ask the mothers (and sometimes the fathers also) how much assistance they receive from CCF?

If you wish to take up this challenge, to see for yourself, I will arrange it for you and any other board members who might be curious to know if what CCF actually does to help families matches the PR Scott churns out on his Facebook pages and in press releases.