Trust is a fragile commodity

How much money does Panthera really spend on conservation?

In the past week or so, an owner of a restaurant in Arizona has come under fire for selling lion burgers at his establishment. Apart from engaging in bad taste, literally, the owner actually did nothing more than buy 10 lbs of lion meat from a ready supplier, but made the world headlines. Other exotic burgers are now much in the news – CNN recently reported on cobra burgers in Indonesia…

What similarly leaves a bad taste is the continued shenanigans that seem to be the order of business in a conservation organization in the USA.
The Panthera Foundation, based in New York and an offshoot of the Wildlife Conservation Society (Bronx Zoo) recently came under fire on a popular blog site (http://planyoursafari.com/blog/the-big-business-of-conservation/). To recap the report, an investigation of their financial records (helpfully provided on their old website) revealed a great disparity between their claims that they spend every dollar received in donations on their conservation efforts (“100% of your donation goes to the field – where it matters most”) versus their actual expenditures. Their 2008 expenditures included $910,050 for salaries, $238,332 for legal and professional fees, $255,380 for travel and meals, purchase of $1,025,062 worth of “fixed assets”, expenditures of $1,075,179 on “leasehold improvements”, and rent for their offices of $239,017. Etcetera.

That rent, interestingly, was paid to Chairman of the Board Thomas Kaplan, a multibillionaire who pledged $5 million over ten years to Panthera. The lease agreement, according to Panthera’s financial documents, reads as follows: “During 2008, Panthera entered into a lease for office space under a non-cancellable operating sublease which expires on Jan 31, 2015”.  Total payments over the years of $1,356,680.

Panthera does spend money on conservation, but seemingly not as much as you would think. For lions and tigers, for example, they handed the Wildlife Conservation Society $1,286,793 as part of a contractual obligation involved in the original split that created Panthera. What WCS did with that money is uncertain, but is a clear example of internal shuffling. Panthera spent $654,679 on “program services” and what that means is also uncertain, but again is probably classifiable as an overhead. The sum total of actual grants made to lion projects amounted to about $180,000, of which $90,958 was spent in Europe where lions abound. The remainder as identified by wire transfers to actual lion projects in Africa is also uncertain – the financial documents do not always identify recipients – some say “lion project”, others just say “Sub-Saharan Africa”. But in actual fact Panthera probably pays much more in actual dollars to office rent than to conserve lions.

DAMAGE CONTROL?

The article making these revelations appeared on the blog site on January 6, 2010. Within days, the following statement appeared on the Panthera website:

“Panthera guarantees that 100% of your donation goes to field conservation of wild cats. We are able to make this promise because all our administrative, office and salary costs - ‘overhead’- are covered in their entirety by Panthera’s founder and Chairman of the Board, Dr. Tom Kaplan. Every year, Dr. Kaplan underwrites those costs. That allows Panthera to make the unique promise that every cent from every other donation will indeed be directed to the field and, in many cases, be matched by additional programmatic funds contributed by Dr. Kaplan. We guarantee it.”

Panthera also later totally revised their website – no more financial statements are now available (but these are in the public domain – go to http://foundationcenter.org/findfunders/990finder/ and type in Panthera Corporation, New York, and look at the Form 990 they are obliged to file as a tax-exempt organization. The 2008 statement is the latest they filed, and one could be excused for looking forward to what they produce for 2009).
In that financial statement, it is clear that Dr Kaplan (he has a degree in History) certainly did not underwrite any costs, and certainly did collect the rent. Dr Kaplan’s $5 million pledge to Panthera is certainly generous by any standard, but this is over ten years. So let’s say $500,000 per year. That amount barely covers “legal and professional fees” and the annual salary of Alan Rabinowitz ($206,249), the co-founder of Panthera. If Dr Kaplan is going to make good the 2008 overheads he will be out of a lot of money and even multibillionaires are restricting their budgets a bit these days. Perhaps Dr Kaplan is now covering all overheads after the expose, and no longer charging rent? And Panthera has now set up offices in the UK, so more outlays to be covered…
I would urge Panthera to come clean. Provide all the facts and the figures, not glowing statements on altered websites to soothe the masses. Conservation organizations are struggling in these difficult financial times, and have to rely on complete transparency to satisfy donors with less and less disposable income. Trust is a fragile commodity and will not proliferate if leading organizations make statements seemingly at variance with facts - look at the tattered reputation of BP for a recent example of such consequences. 

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