Kids Company chief executive Camila Batmanghelidjh is facing a grilling from MPs on 15 October after her charity folded in August amid allegations of mismanagement.
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In August 2002, Ms Batmanghelidjh said that £71,390 of income was recorded in the wrong financial year in their accounts “because of the confusion which arose at the time”.
In August, the charity collapsed despite a £3million grant from the Cabinet Office.
Mr Yentob said money was not given out “willy nilly” but admitted that envelopes of cash were handed to children with no control over how it was spent. “It wasn’t. It was accounted for”.
Ms Batmanghelidjh said that “poverty intervention payments” were made to cover food vouchers, bus passes and emergency grants.
As she made the claim, Mr Jenkin warned: “You are aware that it is a contempt of Parliament to mislead this committee and that is a very serious thing”.
Ms Batmanghelidjh – who has been publicly feted by David Cameron and other leading politicians – said there were officials in Whitehall who had deliberately set out to undermine the charity by briefing against it.
The shock claim came from the charity’s chairman Alan Yentob, who is also the BBC’s creative director, as he gave evidence to Westminster’s powerful Commons Public Administration Select Committee.
“The vigilance of this was quite considerable”, he said.
Ms Batmanghelidjh insisted that the distribution of payments to clients was properly supervised.
Kids Company, which has said “very few charities” have faced the level of scrutiny it has faced in recent years, cites a long list of “thorough and positive reports relating to Kids Company’s beneficiaries, activities and value for money”.
She said clients then had to sign for the envelope at reception.
Asked how she managed to balance her duties, she said her caseload would be kept an eye on daily and in terms of helping manage the company, she said: “We had all the right people in the right place”.
“It came from a source which obviously wanted to damage Kids Company”, he said.
“None of you have visited the organisation, you haven’t had the opportunity to talk to any of the staff”.
He acknowledged however that when Ms Batmanghelidjh was interviewed on the Radio 4 Today programme, he had stood alongside the producer – a move which he accepted could have been seen as intimidatory.
He said: “She was the emblematic figure – she was visited year after year by people from across the world”.
Mr Yentob addressed the allegations of sexual misconduct leveled at the organisation, saying while they had not come from “anywhere near the Cabinet Office”, he believed the leak was malicious.
“And the breakdown of the flow of funds on the streets led to the violence”.
She added: “I have incredible nervousness about the type of briefings that have been flying around between Government and elements of the media”.
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“That’s how much rigour went into putting this package together”.
