It was reported on the ABC this morning that sacked RSPCA CEO Ben Sturges has withdrawn his bid for re-instatement, apparently deciding that he does not want to work for the terminally flawed organization any more after five month of bitter legal wrangling. RSPCA President Paul Swiatkowski bizarely claimed this vindicated the decisions of the board of just three members.
Suzanne Cass, from Stop Tasmanian Animal Cruelty has called for openness and transparency in what the board has spent throughout this debacle, as well as how the appointment of Mr Sturges came about, given that he met none of the advertised selection criteria for the position. Ms Cass believes that the matter has been withdrawn to avert the exposure of the facts behind Mr Sturges’ dismissal and the conduct of the board in the matter.
StopTAC has obtained documents which indicate that the RSPCA board in Tasmania has spent more than $36,000 in legal fees, just in the month of November 2012, for example.
For the financial year to date, the RSPCA has spent over $59,000 on its lawyers, as well as $32,000 in ‘professional fees’, believed to be largely the human resources investigation into the conduct of its sacked CEO, Ben Sturges.
‘We have obtained some documents which outline the sorts of amounts the RSPCA has been receiving and spending’, said StopTAC’s Suzanne Cass, ‘While these obscene amounts have been spent on corporate damage control, the animal protection regime in the state remains in crisis. Nothing Paul Swiatkowski says can vindicate this extraordinary and unconscionable maladministration’.
In November, the RSPCA President, Paul Swiatkkwski issued a media statement claiming that the RSPCA ‘is not a proactive litigant’. Ms Cass says that nowhere in the expenditure items can she see a single entry describing amounts spend on the animals which are the RSPCA’s core responsibility; rather massive sums have been spent on corporate damage control on an ongoing basis.
‘We already had the Annual Report and Financial Statements up to June 30 2012’, continued Ms Cass. ‘These documents alone showed that the RSPCA spent outrageous amounts on corporate damage control, employment expenses of over $2.2 million, and very little spent on the animals at all. All this corporate self-indulgence continued in the face of extraordinary losses in sponsorships, for example, and the situation has been taken so seriously by the Government that an investigation by the Parliamentary Standing Committee for Public Accounts is underway’.
Ms Cass also said that the animal protection regime in the state remains terminally fractured while it is in the hands of the moribund RSPCA, and claims that the Department of Fair Trading has done nothing to force the three member board to comply with its governing Act, the Associations Incorporations Act.
‘The Department of Fair Trading continues to ignore the complaints we have filed with it, said Ms Cass. ‘Nothing has been done to address the delinquent behavior of this board, because the government appears to be too lazy, or too fractured itself, to take the steps it should be taking to disband this sorry outfit. It must dismiss the board, hold these three members to account, and appoint a competent administrator. And most importantly, the government must stop providing taxpayer bailout funds to keep this sorry outfit afloat and it must disclose amounts already given and what they were spent on’, she concluded.
