Up my space with a property investor. my space signed leases with the investor and paul o rourke sold the properties for 3.9 million, 1.5 million more than he paid, a tidy sum. what made the properties so much more valuable to the investor were long leases with rent paid for by the taxpayer through housing benefit. you ve got people who are actively targeting people with support needs so that they can make money out of the situation, and that should not be allowed. paul o rourke helped set up my space in 2012, and since then the charity has received around £100 million of public money. paul o rourke says he s not been involved in the running of the charity since 2016. since then he s concentrated on his property business, enabling homes.
Of the government but, in 2017, it refused to pay the charity the £360 it wanted for each one bedroom flat. itjust didn t stack up. they are charging more for rent than everybody else, itjust didn t feel right to me. how can i put it? it didn t sit comfortably with me. at a rent tribunal earlier this year, the council argued paul o rourke was indirectly profiting from high charges my space were charging. thejudge didn t agree, saying he had seen no evidence to suggest impropriety, and the rent was fair. i showed councillor fritchley some of the documents from our whistleblowers. they show there is a link between paul o rourke
I regard it as totally inappropriate. we ve learntjust how financially dependent my space was on paul o rourke. in 2020, he donated virtually all the money my space says it spent supporting its tenants, £6 million. he had a stranglehold over the charity, was able to get the charity to do whatever he wanted, because they relied on him. they were dependent on him. we have also discovered that paul o rourke owed the charity a small fortune, £4] million. my space say £2.2 million has been repaid, with the rest due next month. documents from 2018 2021 appear to show my space agreeing to pay loans at the request of paul 0 rourke s company, enabling homes.
how many moves have you had this week? how many moves are you planning for next week? and any kind of churn is like they are talking about a tin of tuna on a shelf, rather than a person. my space says, as a not for profit provider, it only takes on property where there is demand. it says paul o rourke isn t involved in decisions made by the board and all transactions with him and his companies are at arm s length. blackpool. and a block of eight flats. another property once owned by paul o rourke and sold on to investors with the lease to my space. chris, jemma and louise, who have all struggled with their mental health, lived here from 2020 until late last year. it looks like quite a nice building. it does from the outside but when obviously you get in there, it s not good at all.
And claims the charity has been failing some tenants. it doesn t feel like home, it feels like a prison. it was destroyed, absolutely destroyed. i ve never seen anything like it. we ask, is public money being exploited for private gain? it s a really wild west system i and the winners are the people creaming off quite often very large profits. - boats like this don t come cheap. most people would never have the opportunity to own a boat like this. it would cost you more than a couple of hundred grand, and you can see why. one just like this was bought by a property developer called paul o rourke. here he is explaining his business model. we are a private limited company that buys properties