Charity site denies embezzlement

Shilehui.com, a website that allows people to create personalized pleas for charitable donations, on Sunday denied recent accusations that it embezzled the majority of the donations it received.

Some of the individuals recently seeking help on the website said that the website had charged them significant amounts for their posts to be displayed on the site's front page, reported Sichuan-based Chengdu Business Daily Thursday.

"The more you gave the website, the longer your post stayed on the front page," said an anonymous source who sought help on Shilehui.

One construction worker who had raised 210,000 yuan ($34,300) by putting his plea for help on the website claimed to have received only 30,000 yuan.

He told Business Daily that the website had kept the rest as a promotional fee.

"This [accusation] is not true," Shi Zhengnian, an employee at Shilehui told the Global Times on Sunday. "The majority of the donations made their way to his account."

Shi said that the 210,000 yuan was not the total amount of donations received, but rather was the sum of the donations the worker had received added to the amount he had paid the site to promote his post.

Shi admitted that the platform has collected promotional fees, but had cancelled the practice in May after concluding that it was "inappropriate."

However, some of Shilehui's users said that, even after the cancellation, they were still required to give money to pay promotional fees to a website called "46 Internet Marketing Center."

"Shilehui and 46 are one company. The promotional fees [paid to 46] eventually make their way into Shilehui's pocket," Chengdu Business Daily quoted a former employee of Shilehui as saying.

Shi said that 46 is a business partner Shilehui worked with to continue the promotional fee program.

The Jinhua Charity Federation, Shilehui's supervising organization, announced on Friday that it has urged Shilehui to stop its partnership with 46, and said it would soon be auditing Shilehui.

"What happened to Shilehui is a reflection of the public's distrust towards philanthropies in China," Zhang Gaorong, an assistant dean at Beijing Normal University China Philanthropy Research Institute, told the Global Times.

"It's reasonable for a non-profit platform to collect fees to operate their website. However, there's a lack of regulation on how fees are collected and how large they can be," said Zhang.

Shilehui claims to have raised more than 100 million yuan for over 49,000 families since its founding in 2007.