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Comment by veltas | Hacker News Reader

The bit that feels dishonest is they share a brand, and publicly present themselves as a charity, and actually it's for personal gain. Sure they dotted their i's, but it seems like the key difference between the RPI foundation and the Captain Tom Foundation[1] is they have better lawyers.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/21/captain-tom-...

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No two separate things, you cannot, basically, trade under a charity structure, it would be almost legally impossible for the charity to be selling the raspberry Pis.

Captain tom was just a badly run charity, they didn't trade.

Yes, setting up a commercial subsidiary is the standard way to go to trade in order to raise money for a charity.

But I think a charity should spend most of its income on charitable activities. According to its accounts the Foundation spends £12m on that out of a £213m income from trading, which seems very small.

Sure, but they're now a publicly traded company aren't they, it couldn't be say 60% whereas <=10% is a decent chunk but can still be justified to shareholders in the context of renting the trademark (which I HOPE resides in the foundation) and good will/marketing.

That's not quite how it is.

The commercial subsidiary is a publicly-traded company and the Foundation (the charity) owns about 49% of it (last year it wasn't publicly traded and they owed ~98% of it iirc). The Foundation received £213m from "other trading activities" last year (which I interpret as income from their share of the commercial subsidiary) out of a total income of £220m. Out of this, the Foundation spent £12m on "charitable activities" and £195m on "raising funds"... [1]

[1] https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...

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