- Sunday, April 02, 2023
Wilson Chowdhry travelled to Australia to meet her during their relationship.
By: Chandrashekar Bhat
A woman has demanded justice after a “puppet master” who allegedly abused her was allowed to indirectly control a charity he previously headed.
Lara Hall said it was “totally inappropriate” that Wilson Chowdhry was replaced by his wife as the boss of the Ilford-based British Pakistani Christian Association (BPCA).
Hall said Chowdhry had rescued her from “sex slavery” in Pakistan but she discovered her experience during their relationship later was not normal.
She said she met a Pakistani man in Australia in 2012. Eight years later, she travelled to Pakistan to visit him.
However, her visit turned out to be a nightmare as she was “sexually exploited, starved, subject to long periods of confinement,” she told MyLondon.
When Hall, 34, was looking to escape, she came across BPCA which was led by Chowdhry at the time.
According to her account, her conservation with the charity boss was professional initially and he even travelled to New South Wales to meet her.
Chowdhry returned to the UK but the pair continued to remain in touch. Their relationship gradually became romantic and they struck up an affair. Chowdhry – a married man with three children – travelled between London and Australia.
Hall claimed the man began making menacing demands including oral sex “five times a day”. He told her to reduce her weight as he wanted her to be “anorexic” and a “trophy wife”.
During their WhatsApp conversation, he asked her to share saucy images of her identical twin sister. He allegedly told Hall to “suck my big hard c***” and “drink my protein-filled j***”.
She claimed Chowdhry even wanted her backside to be tattooed saying, “that’s where slaves are marked and you’re my b***h.”
After contacting several safeguarding organisations to get her concerns addressed, she reached out to Barking MP Dame Margaret Hodge.
Weeks later, the assistant head of case management at the UK’s Charity Commission spoke to Hall and reportedly said actions would be taken to wind up the charity.
Chowdhry resigned as a BPCA trustee in 2019 but the charity was allowed to operate again with his wife in charge of it.
Hall said, “It shouldn’t be up to me to point out the blinding obvious that it’s totally inappropriate for her to take up the mantle”.
“I feel he is a puppet master. I want public accountability and justice,” she said.
A BPCA spokesperson said Chowdhry was no longer a trustee of the charity and “we are not willing to comment further.”
A Charity Commission spokesperson told MyLondon: “It is not open to the Commission to ‘remove charitable status’ as a sanction. It is not accurate to suggest that we ‘promised’ an external party that the charity would be ‘struck off the register’. However, we have accepted that our communication regarding the charity’s future could have been clearer.”
“We took robust action in this case. We considered all powers available to us, and issued the trustees with an official warning. Our case handling has been examined in depth, and found to have been in accordance with our published regulatory and risk framework,” the spokesperson said.
.gif)
