Hedge fund manager argued charity wasn’t concerned about hen harriers
ENVIRONMENT EDITOR
Thursday 06 August 2015
The RSPB has dismissed accusations by a City tycoon that it is waging a “class war” against the shooting fraternity as the “utterly ridiculous” comments of a man who knows nothing about the charity.
It has invited Crispin Odey, an old Harrovian hedge fund manager and shooting enthusiast, to visit it to find out more about its work.
This week he accused the RSPB of being the kind of charity that is “run for the people who work for them and not necessarily for the birds”.
Days before the Glorious Twelfth marks the start of the red grouse shooting season, Mr Odey suggested that the RSPB did not really want the rapidly dwindling hen harrier population it champions to recover because it provides a valuable fundraising platform.
And he said attempts to pin the blame for its decline on wealthy grouse-moor owners amounted to the kind of class war one might more typically associate with left-wing Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn.
“It’s utterly ridiculous. Up until relatively recently we had a man on our board of trustees [Sir Anthony Milbank] who ran a grouse moor – and he served two terms,” said Stuart Housden, director of RSPB Scotland.
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