The “dangerous” volunteer was employed “with few, if any, background checks,” the paper has reported
A convicted pedophile was recruited by a charity helping children in Ukraine during the conflict with Russia due to shortcomings in the organization’s vetting process, The Telegraph has reported.
Siobhan’s Trust, since then renamed as HopeFull, hired the man in early 2023 to take part in its operation to distribute free pizzas to children and their families in the western part of the country “with few, if any, background checks,” the paper said in an article on Saturday.
A 52-year-old male who called himself Jack Morgan was paid £500 ($645) a month by the Scottish charity and made regular visits to orphanages, schools, and camps for those displaced by the fighting. Photographs posted by the charity on social media show him playing with young children, the report said.
According to the paper, suspicions about Morgan arose among his colleagues last summer after he began boasting about joining the Ukrainian Foreign Legion and claiming that he was raising money for military supplies on its behalf.
After searching online, they learned that Morgan was previously called Lee Callaghan, a resident of Newport, Wales who was jailed for two years for possessing category A child abuse images and was issued a ten-year sexual harm prevention order (SHPO) in 2017. An SHPO bars a person from leaving the UK without notifying the police. At the time, the National Crime Agency described him as “a dangerous man, who wanted to abuse children,” the report read.
The Telegraph said Morgan changed his name to Callaghan following his release from prison and traveled to Ukraine where he was hired by Siobhan’s Trust.
Sources within the charity told the paper that “all hell broke loose” when Morgan’s true identity was exposed.
A spokesman for HopeFull confirmed that “this individual gained his position under an assumed identity and was then dismissed by the charity in February 2024, at which point the charity was unaware of the allegations against him.”
However, he insisted that “as part of the charity’s safety processes, no volunteer is left unsupervised with vulnerable children or adults, and we always operate in teams of at least four people.”
HopeFull previously acknowledged that it does not have the capacity to carry out proper disclosure and barring service criminal record checks on its potential volunteers, instead relying on internet searches.
