Federal judge dismisses Planet Aid’s lawsuit against Reveal

D. Victoria Baranetsky and Christa Scharfenberg
Reveal
March 29, 2021

"After more than four years of fighting a multimillion-dollar libel lawsuit brought by international aid group Planet Aid, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting was handed a decisive victory last week by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In a lengthy order, a federal judge dismissed the entire case with prejudice.

Reveal’s 2016 investigation into Planet Aid, which received U.S. government funds for aid programs in impoverished areas of southern Africa, tied the charity to an alleged cult and raised significant questions about whether the funds from the U.S. and other governments actually were reaching the people they were intended to help. 

Several months after the initial stories were published, Planet Aid filed a vexatious libel lawsuit against Reveal in federal court. The case hinged on three key questions: Did our reporting result in falsity? Did our journalists act with malice in reporting the story? Are Planet Aid and Lisbeth Thomsen, director of its program in Malawi, public figures? After multiple fights over jurisdiction and more than two years of discovery, the court ultimately found in our favor and dismissed the case. 

Beyond creating positive legal precedent, this case serves as a poignant example of a troublesome legal trend taking place in the news media industry over the past decade: deep-pocketed interests seeking to silence journalists with meritless, expensive defamation suits. The New York Times, Mother Jones, BuzzFeed News and other major news outlets have faced similar lawsuits in recent years. The 2016 claim brought against Gawker by Hulk Hogan, and funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, ultimately led to that outlet’s demise. 

The potential impact of these lawsuits on nonprofit investigative newsrooms like our own (and Mother Jones) and on smaller outlets throughout the country – where local journalism already has been decimated – could be a serious blow for democracy. Fighting the Planet Aid case cost millions of dollars in legal fees and thousands of hours of staff time spent on the nearly constant legal back-and-forth over more than four years."

[ ... ]

Tvind Alert

"Tvind Alert is a journalistic inquiry into a political and non-religious [group] called the Tvind Teachers Group."

" ... A dossier on the Tvind Teachers Group. Are Humana People-to-People, Planet Aid, the Gaia Movement and DAPP siphoning off cash through tax havens? Is it a cult?"

https://www.tvindalert.com/alive-kicking/

Workers at African aid program linked to alleged cult sue for back pay

Matt Smith
REVEAL
August 21, 2017

Staff who worked on U.S. foreign aid projects have filed a legal complaint against an African contractor, claiming they were forced to work thousands of hours without pay.

In interviews, the workers described a secret behind the unpaid hours at the contractor, Development Aid from People to People in Malawi, or DAPP: A cult-like organization called the Teachers Group demanded that members attend indoctrination sessions, where they were admonished to pledge their money, time and free will to the orders of the collective.

“They say Teachers Group is your family, and that is the first family I should observe and be together with all my life,” said Andrew Chalamanda, one of the plaintiffs in a complaint filed with Malawi’s Industrial Relations Court.

Chalamanda worked on farm relief and other programs as an employee of DAPP Malawi for six years. He says he is owed 162 days of back pay.

The Teachers Group was founded by Mogens Amdi Petersen in the 1970s in Denmark. It later expanded into Africa and the United States, setting up DAPP and a U.S. affiliate charity, Planet Aid, according to Danish police documents. The network was part of what prosecutors call a global charities fraud scheme. Its alleged leaders, including Petersen, now are wanted by Interpol and were last seen hiding in Mexico.

The DAPP employees behind the legal complaint described U.S.-funded aid projects that were starved of resources and workers whose lives were controlled 365 days a year.

For its investigation published in 2016, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting visited U.S. Department of Agriculture-supported farm sites in southern and central Malawi that Planet Aid had cited as prime examples of successes. Farmers said they had not received the livestock, water pumps, fertilizer, seedlings and other benefits that had been reported to the USDA. Reveal also obtained documents indicating that grant money meant for DAPP projects was routed to organizations outside Malawi controlled by Teachers Group members.

Workers suing for back pay also bolster previous allegations of an illicit scheme to misuse foreign aid funds.

“A lot of the funding … is not used to help the livelihood of poor Malawians. Fifty to 60 percent of the benefits of the Teachers Group are for the owners who are in Mexico,” said Chalamanda, who was among several Malawians who said DAPP took pains to stage foreign aid projects for visiting funders.

Chalamanda’s descriptions echo a 2013 USDA site inspector’s report, which said DAPP projects looked “highly staged.” In 2015, Reveal met a former USDA project manager in Malawi, who detailed how he mocked up farm projects to impress donors.

“It is painful because I have been used; I have been one of the people who have been used to fulfill somebody’s needs to access funds through the organization. I have been the implementer,” Chalamanda said. “They just wanted to use me to stand there so that the owners of the funds would come, and they would see that we were on the ground doing one, two, three things. So I feel bad.”

Kambani Kufandiko, a plaintiff who worked on USDA-funded DAPP projects between 2008 and 2012, said he accumulated 138 unpaid leave days. He said he also oversaw projects that did not benefit from U.S. funds in the way they were supposed to.

“The United States people, I think they should know the Teachers Group has used their money in a way that was not the intended purpose, where they want to help the community, they want to help poor farmers, they want to help Africans. It’s not like that,” Kufandiko said. “They’re helping somebody who is in Mexico building mansions.”

Chalamanda and other plaintiffs said DAPP is controlled by the Teachers Group, a fact borne out by workers’ forced allegiance to the organization’s principle of “common time,” meaning every minute of a member’s activities is dictated by the group.

Weekends and holidays that other Malawian workers might have spent at home with family instead were spent with co-workers and bosses at supposed training sessions.

These meetings actually were Teachers Group indoctrination marathons “used to brainwash the people’s minds,” said Yona Banda, who worked as a manager on USDA farming projects as a DAPP employee. “People are afraid of what will happen tomorrow because they don’t think they can do anything without the Teachers Group. Teachers Group is the mother of DAPP, and workers in DAPP fear that they will suffer if they go out.”

The British government, UNICEF and UNESCO have cut funds to DAPP Malawi since Reveal reported in 2016 that aid programs there were controlled by the Teachers Group.

Planet Aid sued Reveal and two of its reporters in August 2016, alleging a conspiracy to interfere with business relationships. Reveal is contesting the lawsuit and believes it is without merit.

The USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, over more than a decade, has allocated more than $133 million for programs run by DAPP and its Mozambique affiliate. The funds were routed through the Teachers Group-linked U.S. charity Planet Aid, which used DAPP as a subcontractor. But despite probes launched recently by the U.S. Department of Justice and USDA inspector general, the USDA has not reported severing ties.

In the complaint, 22 employees say DAPP owes them more than 3,400 days’ worth of back pay. DAPP, in a response filed with the Industrial Relations Court of Malawi, said the charity does not owe back wages because the workers did not submit leave forms and thus forfeited unused days off. A court spokesman told Reveal that the case is scheduled for September.

Plaintiffs, however, told Reveal that they were not instructed to file leave forms to take time off for holidays and weekends. Instead, DAPP staff say they were instructed in Petersen’s “common time” doctrine.

“Common time demands you to be with members 24 hours per day, 365 days per year,” Chalamanda said.

Petersen set up the Teachers Group in 1970s Denmark, eventually running a government-funded alternative school system. Newspaper reports there described how Petersen’s growing organization controlled many aspects of followers’ lives, determining who they should marry, whether they could have children and where they could live. He told followers that they were on the vanguard of a coming world socialist revolution, which they would achieve by adhering to common time and “common economy,” which meant money they earned went into secret Teachers Group accounts, as previously reported by Reveal.

In 2001, Danish fraud investigators raided the school network’s offices and alleged that Petersen oversaw a global fraud and money-laundering operation. It was disguised behind a network of charities that included DAPP and Planet Aid, according to prosecutors’ documents. Acquitted of embezzlement and tax evasion in a regional Danish court in 2006, Petersen and some of his associates quickly left the country. Prosecutors refiled charges in a higher court, and in 2013, Interpol issued a bulletin for their arrest.

On June 23, 2016, Danish television channel DR3 videotaped Petersen, then 77, walking on the Mexican Baja California coast toward an elaborate polished stone-and-glass compound that serves as a Teachers Group headquarters, according to former DAPP employees who have been to the compound.

Chalamanda recalled the humiliation of years succumbing to the Teachers Group’s control to keep his job. He described a meeting during which members were compelled to make an annual pledge to recommit their lives to the Teachers Group. He said one DAPP worker did not show up to the meeting because she was sick and had been admitted to a hospital. So other members went to fetch her.

“I even said in the meeting, ‘It is not fair to drag somebody from the hospital just to come and agree to this,’ ” Chalamanda said. “They replied that it’s Teachers Group culture, it’s what they believe in. If you’re together, it will work perfectly.”

https://www.revealnews.org/article/workers-at-african-aid-program-linked-to-alleged-cult-sue-for-back-pay/

Government officials warned colleagues the charity was a cult - to no avail

Matt Smith
Reveal
May 11, 2017

Workers at the U.S. Embassy in Malawi sought to raise the alarm about an organization seeking U.S.-government funds that it labeled a cult. But a foreign aid official rejected the information as “clear bias” and the government allocated $31.6 million to the group, led by followers of an Interpol fugitive last seen hiding in Mexico.

Christine Djondo, an education specialist stationed in the African country of Malawi with the Agency for International Development (USAID), in 2012 warned a co-worker via email about a secretive organization lurking behind two intertwined groups.

“I have diplomatically been able to avoid them,” she wrote in documents USAID released only after Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting filed suit against the agency. Djondo’s comments related to the U.S. charity Planet Aid, and its subcontractor Development Aid People to People Malawi (DAPP).

“I would just like not to see USDA, the embassy, and (Malawian President) Joyce Banda get caught up in something they might regret,” she added.

Both Planet Aid, and DAPP, have been identified by the FBI and the Danish State Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime as fronts for the Teachers Group, a reputed Danish cult whose leaders are on the run from fraud and tax evasion charges. Reveal previously reported that Malawi farmers who were supposed to have benefitted from U.S.-funded projects run by Planet Aid and DAPP remained impoverished.

By the time of Djondo’s email in 2012, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service had already allocated more than $102 million to Planet Aid projects in Malawi and Mozambique, despite multiple whistleblower warnings about a Danish charities fraud investigation tied to Planet Aid.

Across the ocean at USDA headquarters in Washington, D.C. staff were separately getting similar warnings.

“We have been growing increasingly concerned about the number and frequency of the complaints that we have been receiving about Planet Aid. There are hints of potential fraud and abuse,” read one of a flurry of 2012 internal staff emails expressing concern about Planet Aid’s cult ties.

Internal emails from U.S. government staff based in Malawi don’t indicate whether staff there was aware of the unease in Washington. However, at least four Malawi-based USAID officials separately raised their own concerns.

In a 2012 email, USAID staff member Cybill Sigler blamed the USDA for ignoring DAPP’s troubled history. “It’s their mess to deal with but because USDA doesn’t have a country presence here it becomes our problem. Ugh!!” she wrote. In response to one of several emails in which Djondo complained about fielding DAPP inquiries Sigler wrote: “I feel your pain.

USAID Malawi mission director Doug Arbuckle sent this advice via email to three of his staff: “My suggestion would be to just delete their emails without reading.”

Planet Aid representatives have repeatedly declined to be interviewed by Reveal, stating, “Planet Aid has not engaged in any illegal or illicit activities.” Planet Aid sued Reveal and two of its reporters in August, alleging a conspiracy to interfere with business relationships. Reveal is contesting the lawsuit and believes it is without merit.

The newly disclosed documents indicate DAPP and Planet Aid’s reputation made the rounds of the southern African community of foreign aid agencies.

Djondo wrote to Arbuckle that she’d heard that “DAPP is a cult” from the USAID’s German counterpart. In Europe, the Teachers Group is famous as the subject of fraud scandals, criminal trials and moves by governments including the UK and Denmark to halt funding.

“Doug warned me we will never fund them,” Djondo wrote in a June 2012 email to USAID co-workers. “I am not sure if USDA and the embassy are aware of their history and reputation.”

Dane Mogens Amdi Petersen in the early 1970s began teaching his followers that they should fight imperialism by stripping wealth from the bourgeois west. By the 1990s they had set up a global network of fake charities and offshore shell firms as part of a fraud conspiracy, according to 2002 filings in Los Angeles federal court by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which was helping Denmark seek Petersen’s extradition.

Planet Aid’s international partnerships director Marie Lichtenberg was extraordinarily persistent in befriending foreign aid officials, according to former USDA officials and Planet Aid staff members who spoke to Reveal. USDA had no staff in Malawi.

But in November 2012, Kate Snipes, the USDA’s representative for southern Africa stationed 1,200 miles away in Nairobi, Kenya, briefly traveled to Malawi and stood beside Lichtenberg at a Planet Aid/DAPP school ribbon cutting ceremony. Snipes had also met with USAID staff and discussed Planet Aid and DAPP’s requests for additional funds.

In a December email to the USDA’s Washington, D.C. staff titled “Malawi roundup,” Snipes said the ceremony “was very well-done,” adding that “the USAID Mission has a lot of issues and a clear bias against them, but I believe that aside from over persistence, they seem to be unfounded.”

In 2015, the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service announced it had allocated an additional $31.6 million to Planet Aid for programs in Mozambique.

Reveal showed the emails to Kris Alonge, a Kansas bookkeeper who had sought to inform the USDA about Planet Aid’s past in a series of calls and letters to top aid officials between 2006 and 2012.

“These emails were very disturbing. The USDA arrogantly ignored red flags from the FBI, the Danish government, news articles, private citizens (including me!) … and now we see that they ignored the USAID’s warnings as well,” she wrote in an email to Reveal. “Because of the USDA’s foolishness millions in tax dollars were wasted. Worse, aid did not reach the people in need.”

https://www.revealnews.org/blog/government-officials-warned-colleagues-the-charity-was-a-cult-to-no-avail/

Planet Aid's Yellow Clothing Donation Bins Are Part of a Global Cultlike Scam

Andy Cush

gawker.com

May 25, 2016

Those yellow clothing-collection bins behind your local gas station or convenience store aren’t actually particularly charitable, according to a Reveal investigation. Not only will your donations likely not be helping hungry kids in Africa, they may be directly supporting a Danish international fugitive named Mogens Amdi Petersen.

Most bins of this type, which have cropped up just about everywhere in recent years, asking you to drop in your used clothes and shoes, don’t do much good for the world’s poor or the environment. Multiple operators of similar bins have come under fire for selling the collected items for profit, rather than donating the clothes or the proceeds. What separates Planet Aid from the pack is the scale of its operation and the bizarre nature of the organization that seems to be behind it.

Reveal and NBC Washington dug up IRS records showing that Planet Aid makes up to $42 million per year. That money is supposed to be donated to needy communities in places like Malawi and Mozambique. But in an FBI file on Planet Aid’s parent organization also obtained by NBC, investigators wrote that “Little to no money goes to the charities.”

Planet Aid seems to be controlled by a Danish organization known alternately as Tvind or The Teachers Group, which was founded in the 1970s by a man named Mogens Amdi Petersen. According to Danish court documents, Tvind is a kind of secular, ostensibly humanitarian cult, in which members are instructed to live collectively, “transfer all their available income to joint savings,” and “forgo their personal rights, such as the right to start a family to their own wish.” Petersen himself is an internationally wanted man, having allegedly committed fraud and tax evasion and his home country, and the NBC report speculates that he may be hiding out in a $25 million, 494-acre compound in Baja, Mexico.

Former Planet Aid employees said Tvind’s cultishness extended to their organization as well. A Maryland woman who responded to a Planet Aid job posting on Craigslist told NBC that she was asked to panhandle for money, work around the clock, and give 20 percent of her $28,000 salary back to the organization to finance a training program at an ominous-sounding facility called One World Center in Michigan.

Next time you’re looking to donate, avoid the bins and go with one of the many more legitimately humanitarian organizations out there.

http://gawker.com/planet-aids-yellow-clothing-donation-bids-are-part-of-a-1778611205

Digging up dirt on donation bins

Philadelphia Daily News
Christopher Malo
December 05, 2012

THEY SEEM to be everywhere - outside gas stations, in mall parking lots, or beside a neighborhood minimarket. They are donated-clothing bins, those sturdy steel containers where you drop off used clothing for the needy.

Ever wonder where those old shoes, shirts, belts and coats go? The answers may surprise you.

For starters, many of these bins are not run by charities. And most of the stuff you donate isn't given to needy folks in the region.

And two groups active in the donated-clothing business have been linked to a cultlike Danish organization that has been investigated by the Danish government and Interpol.

There are legitimate nonprofits out there, their bins marked with familiar names: Goodwill, the Salvation Army and the St. Vincent de Paul Society. But, they are in the minority these days.

Many other bins are owned by businesses, which resell the used clothing, usually overseas, and pocket the profit.

One of the largest for-profits is USAgain, which has 10,000 bins in 17 states - including 10 in the Philadelphia area. It collects 60 million pounds of clothing, shoes and other textiles a year.

Another 10,000 bins nationwide are operated by Planet Aid, a charity that says it uses the money it makes to fund aid programs in some African nations.

But Planet Aid has been criticized by watchdogs for its high overhead, as only 30 cents on every dollar goes to its aid program.

None of the clothing gathered by USAgain, Planet Aid and other for-profit operators goes to help needy people in the areas where the clothing is collected.

According to Planet Aid spokeswoman Tammy Sproules, once the clothing is picked up from a donation bin, it gets shipped to one of 14 warehouses throughout the country, including one in Hatboro. And from there?

"Most of the clothing donated to Planet Aid gets sold directly to overseas customers," Sproules explained by email.

USAgain and Planet Aid have been linked to a mysterious Danish group, known variously as the Teachers Group and Tvind.

The group has been the subject of investigations and prosecution by the Danish government, which alleges that it is a multimillion-dollar business masquerading as a humanitarian organization.

The group's leader is Mogens Amdi Petersen, a mysterious figure within the organization. He founded it in 1970, and its original mission was to run alternative schools in Denmark. It later expanded, prosecutors said, into a global business operation.

In 2002, the Danish government brought charges against Petersen and other associates, alleging that Tvind set up phony companies to collect grant money and that upper management embezzled most of it.

Petersen and seven other members of the Teachers Group were tried on charges of tax evasion and embezzlement. Petersen and six others were acquitted. Prosecutors immediately announced they would appeal the verdict to a higher court, but Petersen and the others fled before the courts could take action.

After the trial, questions were raised about links between Planet Aid and Tvind.

The Boston Globe reported that Ester Neltrup, the general manager of Planet Aid, along with members of the group's board, were members of the Teachers Group, but Neltrup denied any ties to Petersen. "He has nothing to do with Planet Aid," Neltrup told the Globe, "and his situation has no consequences for Planet Aid."

Questions also arose about links between Tvind and USAgain.

When a Seattle television station ran stories about the USAgain-Tvind link, Mattiaws Wallander, president and chief executive officer of USAgain, admitted he was a member of the Teachers Group but separated himself from the issues in Denmark.

"We are not associated with any organization in Denmark, and if anyone is accused of wrongdoing in Denmark, it doesn't have anything to do with USAgain," Wallander told a TV reporter.

A version of this story appears on the website Metropolis: phlmetropolis.com



http://articles.philly.com/2012-12-05/news/35597302_1_planet-aid-tvind-usagain

Area man takes on Planet Aid

Richmond Daily News
David Knopf
March 25, 2012


Jerry McCarter is just one man, and one man can’t save the world.

But McCarter said he hopes to help his hometown by ridding it of Planet Aid, a non-profit organization that, for years, has been criticized as a get-rich front for Amdi Petersen, a resident of Denmark.

Planet Aid has at least a half-dozen of its yellow collection boxes in Ray County, a figure McCarter said he wants to reduce – and keep – at zero.

“Everyone donates to them and they don’t have a clue where that stuff’s going,” said McCarter, who has contacted most, if not all, the six property owners to have the boxes removed. “This is a national problem, not just in Ray County.”

McCarter said he’s aware of Planet Aid boxes at Susie’s 10-13 Diner, Four Seasons Siding, House of Hair, The Depot, Richmond Bargain Town and Continental Siding in Richmond, and The Crossroads convenience store in Orrick.

There may be others.

McCarter said that none of the property owners is aware that clothing left in the boxes is ultimately sold with the proceeds filtered through a complicated web of organizations linked – directly or indirectly – to Petersen’s TVind in Denmark.





http://www.richmond-dailynews.com/?p=9847