Charities regulator lashes company set up to deliver arthouse cinema

Galway City Tribune – The Charities Regulator has issued a damning verdict of the organisation set up to develop the city’s arthouse cinema.

It criticised accounting practices, oversight, corporate governance, and the lack of skills and competence of Solas-Galway Picture Palace Teoranta to manage such a big project.

The watchdog also found that Solas transferred charitable assets without any independent valuation or a competitive disposal process.

“This meant the charity trustees did not have full visibility of the potential market value of the assets of the charity and there was no opportunity for the assets to remain within the charity sector,” inspectors said.

The regulator issued the findings yesterday after a year-long probe into the affairs of Solas, which was voluntarily liquidated in July last year. Solas received over €7 million from public sector bodies, together with the site for the cinema, which was purchased for €1.9 million by the City Council in 2007. In December 2016, a substantial part of the charity’s assets and liabilities were transferred to a private company to operate the cinema.

The findings are critical of Solas in other areas, too. Inspectors found that “no income was recorded after 2007 by the charity, when income was in fact generated in the form of donations.”

It was “incorrect” of Solas to include public donations as liabilities, it said. Despite the huge level of public money spent on the project, inspectors said, Solas “did not ensure it had the appropriate corporate governance structure in place to govern and oversee the activity and decisions made by the charity”.
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