She is said to have attended £28,000-a-year Dauntsey's School in Wiltshire

Camila Batmanghelidjh’s Kids Company is being investigated over claims that thousands of pounds of the charity’s money was spent on paying the boarding school costs of her chauffeur’s daughter.

The Charity Commission has launched a probe into allegations by former Kids Company employees that the charity helped bankroll a place for the teenage daughter of Jeton Cavolli, her personal driver, at Dauntsey’s School in Wiltshire –where fees reach £28,000 a year.

The investigation was triggered last month after employees met the Commission to set out their concerns about whether the arrangement represented proper use of the charity’s money.

It was among several matters raised during the meeting.

Close: Tony Cavolli is pictured driving Camila Batmanghelidjh. A probe has been launched in to claims Kids Company paid for his daughter's school fees

The revelation comes just days after Kids Company collapsed amid a welter of allegations about Batmanghelidjh’s organisation, including financial mismanagement and sexually inappropriate behaviour by young people linked to the charity.

The Mail on Sunday understands that Mr Cavolli, 46, known as ‘Tony’, has been on the charity’s payroll for nearly two decades. He is believed to have been paid about £40,000 a year.

The 46-year-old has been working for the charity for nearly 20 years

Mr Cavolli, who is originally from Albania, is described by staff who worked at the London HQ of the defunct organisation as being so close to Batmanghelidjh that she treated him ‘like a member of her family’.

However, employees are said to have been angered that Kids Company funds – donated to help some of society’s most damaged children – apparently helped to support Mr Cavolli’s daughter at Dauntsey’s.

The school’s chairman of governors, Richard Handover, is also the vice-chairman of Kids Company’s board of trustees.

Late last night Batmanghelidjh contacted The Mail on Sunday to say she could prove to the Charity Commission that no money had been paid by Kids Company to the school to cover academic fees because they had been covered by the school in the form of a bursary.

It is understood the bursary covered the cost of boarding fees, not ‘extras’ and other costs incurred by the girl at the school.

When asked why her charity’s accounts had shown thousands of pounds being paid to the school on behalf of the girl, who was listed as a client of the charity, Batmanghelidjh said: ‘I don’t have the accounts in front of me. I don’t know what those figures relate to.’

A source who until recently worked at the charity said last night: ‘I can confirm that Ms Cavolli was registered as a client at Kids Company, and that Kids Company funds were spent supporting her while she was at school.’ It is understood that the amount paid was a five-figure sum.

The independent school was founded in 1542 and is set in more than 100 acres on the edge of Salisbury Plain. According to school records, Miss Cavolli left last summer. A source told this newspaper that employees had contacted the Charity Commission to inform them that Miss Cavolli’s name was among a group registered formally with Kids Company as ‘clients’ – vulnerable people who used its services.

It is claimed by a source that the charity paid for a number of clients to attend fee-paying schools as part of its Child Poverty Busting Programme. The charity’s website states: ‘We see the impact of such acute deprivation at our centres every day, which is why we need your help to restore dignity and hope to these courageous children.’

The source, who asked to remain anonymous, said: ‘I met Tony Cavolli’s daughter several times. She seemed like a nice, well-adjusted girl. It seems incredible that she was registered as a Kids Company client because there was nothing wrong with her, as far as I could tell.’

Privileged start: Dauntsey's co-educational school where fees can reach £28,000 a year (file image)

In her 2006 book Shattered Lives, Batmanghelidjh wrote an affectionate dedication to her chauffeur, saying: ‘I am especially grateful to Tony Cavolli for his tenacity and wisdom and for being such fun to work with.’

As well as being her chauffeur, it has been stated that he had been Batmanghelidjh’s ‘operations manager’ since 1997. But a second former employee queried this account, saying: ‘I don’t think Tony was paid to do anything other than drive Camila’s car. She can’t drive and she never took public transport because she didn’t like to walk long distances.’

'Normal girl’: Mr Cavolli’s daughter at the family’s London home

The investigation is likely to heap further pressure on to the chairman of trustees, BBC executive Alan Yentob, who – like Batmanghelidjh – has denied all allegations of financial impropriety by the charity. He has said repeatedly the charity passed 19 years’ worth of audits.

Neither Batmanghelidjh nor Yentob has yet responded to The Mail on Sunday’s allegation last month that the charity failed to file accounts with Companies House for the calendar year 2002.

In that year, emails seen by this newspaper show that Yentob secretly lobbied Treasury officials over the charity’s unpaid £700,000 employment tax bill. In the end, £589,000 of the debt was written off.

During its 19-year existence, Kids Company claimed to have raised about £165 million – at least £40 million of which came from the public purse.

A Charity Commission spokesman confirmed that former employees had raised concerns with it about ‘alleged inappropriate spending’ – including the Cavolli case – at a meeting on July 16. Kids Company was alerted to the claims the following day and a meeting took place between its representatives and the Charity Commission on July 21.

The spokesman said: ‘A number of allegations made by former employees of the charity are currently being examined as part of our ongoing compliance case. The Commission was contacted by former employees of the charity and met them on July 16 to discuss specific concerns about alleged inappropriate spending, breaches of financial controls and concerns about the viability of the organisation.

‘These include some specific allegations that The Mail on Sunday have outlined to us.

‘We notified the charity of the complaints on July 17 and met with charity representatives on July 21. At that meeting we insisted on a number of steps being taken, including that, under the oversight of the Commission, the charity instigate an immediate independent examination into the specific allegations made.

‘This work was still ongoing when the charity announced its closure on Wednesday.’

When The Mail on Sunday approached Mr Cavolli’s wife, Gjylejeta, and asked to speak to her husband about the Charity Commission investigation she threatened to call the police if we did not ‘back off’.

Neither Mr Yentob nor a Kids Company spokesman responded to requests for comment.

MoS Man: How colourful chief blamed me for exposing her by MILES GOSLETT

I raised the first questions about Kids Company in February, when I used an article in the Spectator magazine to air concerns about the way the charity was run.

Gradually, as I was contacted by insiders, I pieced together a fuller picture: ex-staff deeply troubled by the way it spent money; ex-clients confessing their regret at accepting money for nothing. All wanted certain facts to be known by the public.

Over the past five weeks, The Mail on Sunday has led the way in exposing the scale of the problems.

We revealed how the chairman Alan Yentob used a BBC email account to secretly lobby Treasury officials over £689,000 in unpaid employment taxes which Kids Company had deducted from its staff but failed to pass on to the taxman. The bill was waived – again secretly – costing taxpayers £589,000. A private donor paid the rest.

Another MoS article revealed that at least two sexual assaults involving Kids Company clients were reported to senior figures in the charity but never passed to police; and clients told this newspaper they were given cash handouts which were spent on drink and drugs. These reports form the basis of the alleged media witch-hunt to which founder Camila Batmanghelidjh and Yentob attribute the charity’s downfall. But the scandal is, if anything, growing.

The story emerging is of a chaotic organisation lacking the financial controls expected of a project given about £115 million in private donations and £40 million from central government since 1996 – including £7.26 million from the Cabinet Office since April alone.

How else to explain the 600 staff now without a job and the many vulnerable people who depended on the charity being left high and dry? Yet instead of acknowledging that Kids Company might itself be responsible for its insolvency, Batmanghelidjh and Yentob have sought to blame, directly or indirectly, ‘the media’ for its closure on Wednesday. In reality, it seems that Kids Company simply did not welcome Press scrutiny.

On several occasions in recent weeks Batmanghelidjh has singled out my efforts to expose in print some of the problems surrounding Kids Company and claimed these reports were responsible for its demise. On Friday morning, on LBC radio, she said there was a ‘massive public hatred’ for Kids Company which was ‘driven by the media’. She added: ‘It all started with Miles Goslett.’

So, according to this £90,000 chauffeur-driven chief executive, all of this is my fault. Earlier in the week she emailed her supporters saying my ‘capacity for fantasy was very well developed’; and I was acting ‘irresponsibly’.

These sound like the words of someone refusing to accept responsibility for their own organisation, and seeking to shift the blame.

I began looking into Kids Company in 2013. Staff urged me to expose what they saw as ‘serial exaggerations’ about the numbers using its services, and ‘serious’ financial irregularities.

My early attempts to publish these concerns failed, mainly because of the charity’s reliance on City law firm Withers to send threatening letters on its behalf to newspapers and magazines.

The charity seemed astonished that any journalist should question it. Eventually, seven months ago, I published my article, which confirmed that Kids Company’s claim to reach 36,000 children and young people was untrue; that a widow who had donated £200,000 claimed she was not shown details of how her money was spent; and that David Cameron over-ruled his own sceptical Ministers in 2012 to insist that millions of public funds continue to be given to the charity.

This was the first faintly negative piece about Kids Company to appear in the mainstream media in 19 years.

Now the police are investigating a growing list of sex-crime allegations linked to the charity; receivers will shortly begin assessing its accounts; and MPs on the Public Accounts Committee are likely to want to grill Batmanghelidjh and Yentob in the autumn.