Camelia Botnar in 2012

I've just spotted that the Camelia Botnar foundation accounts for 2012 have appeared on the Charities Commission website, so I thought I'd take a quick look to see how they are doing. See my notes on their 2011 accounts for the previous context.

Some of the highlights: for context, remembar that Camelia Botnar Ltd. (CBL) is the commercial arm, and Camelia Botnar Foundation (CBF) is the charity.

Trustee Natasha Malby retired in 2012, as she did from the Marcela Trust as well.

"The Foundation has forged links with a foundation in Transylvania with a view to starting a programme of skills and culture exchange visits." This matches the Marcela Trust activity donating £170K to fund "specific Community initiatives in the impoverished Zarand area of Western Transylvania". The CBF and the MT seem to be clearly aligned in their overall direction, which shouldn't surprise us given the personnel overlap.

OMC Investments randomly donated a carpet.

CBL donated £152K to CBF, nearly twice last year's figure. CBL brought in about £750K of income, similar to last year. They improved performance primarily by reducing cost of sales by nearly £100K, about 15%.

The OMC endowment fund was pretty static, value of investments was up 3%

CBF had about the same expenditures overall as last year, but income was about £200K lower, primarily due to a drop from £300K to about £0K in voluntary income.

Investment performance was much better for the year, up £1.3M as opposed to last year's £1.7M loss. The FTSE went from to 5495 to 5958 that year, so it looks like they rode the wave up reasonably well.

Net funds went up from £5.1M to £6.3M, presumably in anticipation of some spending in 2013.

Wages and salaries were pretty flat, and they had 3 fewer charitable activities staff (from 48).

The investment properties took a bit of a bath, down about 8% from the beginning of year evaluation (£9.2M). As I noted last year: "After last year's near-£3mm loss on revaluation, one wonders how well this will continue to perform..." "Not that well", apparently.

Overall a "steady as she goes" year. Looks like CBF has stabilized after last year's ramp-up on charitable activities staff. As long as their investments continue to perform, they're pretty stable. One hopes that they won't try any more property investing though.