Sophie Chandauka committed a hostile takeover of Sentebale last year. The board of trustees tried to oust her, but she refused to leave. Then most of the board resigned in disgust, and Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso resigned in solidarity from the charity they founded in 2006. In the months that followed, Sentebale’s fundraising dried up and Chandauka looted the charity’s cash reserves. She also fired a lot of Sentebale employees, mothballed the Sentebale Children’s Center in Lesotho and closed down the charity’s London office. In April of this year, Chandauka sued Prince Harry and Mark Dyer for “defamation,” and claimed that she was using “external funding” for the lawsuit. Not suspicious at all! Also not suspicious: according to the Daily Mail’s Richard Eden, Sentebale is having a banner year when it comes to fundraising.

Losing not one but two royal patrons amid a storm of accusation and counter-accusation might be considered enough to condemn any organisation to a bleak future. But, 18 months after it lost Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, Sentebale, the charity they founded in 2006, is displaying signs of admirable vigour and a renewed sense of purpose.

Despite Harry and Seeiso’s departures – following the resignations of several trustees, including Mark Dyer, sometimes known as Harry’s ‘second dad’ – Sentebale, now chaired by Sophie Chandauka, managed to pull in £342,000 in donations in the last financial year. That’s nearly £50,000 more than in 2024.

Chandauka, with whom Harry and Seeiso’s relationship was said to have deteriorated ‘beyond repair’, also presided over a substantial rise in legacies. Money bequeathed to Sentebale more than trebled from £47,000 to £189,000.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the charity’s annual report, just published, bristles with defiance.

‘We ran Sentebale with commercial discipline… rigorous on cost, ambitious in impact and focused on the value of every pound entrusted to us,’ it states. Chandauka won’t be complacent though. The polo matches which Harry played in always proved a payday for Sentebale.

Without them, ‘events income’ plunged from £715,000 to £70,000, while cash from institutional sources dropped from £2.6 million to £1.7 million.

But Chandauka may well think it a price worth paying. Following Harry’s resignation, she went on television and accused him of ‘harassment and bullying at scale’, of playing ‘the victim card’, and observed that ‘the number-one risk for this organisation was the toxicity of its lead patron’s brand’. He denied the claims.

[From The Daily Mail]

Prince Harry generally tried to do one or two Sentebale fundraising polo matches a year, and those polo matches raised millions of dollars. That’s why Sentebale had millions in cash reserves when Chandauka played out her audacious takeover scheme. She looted the cash reserves, lavished money on “consultants,” stopped providing Sentebale’s services, and now she wants a gold star for raising a fraction of the money she already wasted (while also ignoring the fact that Harry’s polo matches were major fundraising boons). And what services will Sentebale provide at this point? Sentebale is a shell of what it once was, and this new money will inevitably go towards Chandauka lining her own pockets and paying for more external “consultants.” She’s also never answered the questions about where she got the money to sue Harry and Mark Dyer.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, screencaps courtesy of Sky News.