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Welfare minister Lord Freud’s family charity is spending more of its fund on investments in the US stock market - than it is dishing out on good causes, writes Ben Glaze in the Sunday People .

Figues show the Jecda Foundation - run by the under fire Tory peer , his wife and children - dished out just £37,000 last year.

It plans to spend even less in the next 12 months - earmarking only £12,000 for a single project, according to its accounts.

In contrast the charity has ploughed £250,000 into a “dollar tracker fund” in the US stock market and saw the value of another investment soar by almost £350,000.

Records reveal Jecda, which claims its objective is “poverty relief”, received £5,000 more in dividends from its investments and shares than it spent on worthy schemes it backed.

Under-fire Lord Freud faced calls to quit last week after suggesting people with mental disabilities were “not worth” the minimum wage and could be paid £2 an hour.

(Image: PA)

Answering a question from a Conservative councillor at the party’s conference earlier this month(OCT), the millionaire ex-banker responsible for the Bedroom Tax and slashing benefits for hundreds of thousands of Britain’s worst-off families, said: “There is a group where actually, as you say, they’re not worth the full wage.”

The peer is one of five trustees of Jecda; the others are his wife Lady Priscilla and their children Emily, Andrew and Juliet.

The charity is registered to the family’s eight-bedroom country mansion in Kent. They also own a £1.9million home in north London.

The Freuds registered Jecda in December 2006. The charity says its mission is “the relief of poverty, the advancement of education and health and the advancement of environmental protection or improvement”.

Despite the charity’s environmental passion, Lord Freud is also a shareholder in an investment firm which has just one interest – a company working in oil and gas.

Latest Charity Commission records show Jecda is stockpiling money, with £1,956,862 in reserves last December compared with £1,778,490 the previous year.

The accounts admit: “At the present time, the Foundation has aimed to build up its reserves”.

The value of one of its investments, Inshares plc, nearly doubled from £405,000 to £747,000 from 2012 to 2013.

(Image: Reuters)

Jecda does not have a website and according to annual accounts has supported only a handful of projects.

In June 2010, just weeks after joining the Government, Lord Freud boasted about Jecda funding the “grandmentors” scheme through volunteering and social action charity CSV.

The project saw more than 50 retired people paired with troubled teens to help them find jobs, training and stay out of prison.

He said: “I think there is a huge, untapped resource of older and retired people who could transform the lives of youngsters, many of whom don’t have someone independent to talk to.

“I also think there’s huge potential in jumping a generation to help tackle some of the serious problems facing young people in our society.”

Last year Jecda gave £12,000 to CSV and £25,000 to KeepOut, a “crime diversion scheme” delivered by serving prisoners inside jails to warn youngsters off crime.

The Foundation received a £75,000 donation last year, including £15,000 of gift aid, from its “principal donor” - an unnamed, mystery backer.

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Under “future plans”, the accounts say: “The major effort is going into the mentoring project, which runs for a further four months.

“A further commitment of up to £12,000 was made for the 2013/14 year and a decision will be made in the spring as to future development and involvement in the project.”

The charity failed to a repeat a £1,000 grant to Cure Cancer, which it made in 2012 but not the following year.

Meanwhile, the Sunday Mirror has unearthed an interview Lord Freud gave in 2006 talking about his career brokering multibillion-pound share deals in the City.

He told how by the time he retired, he found: “Every time you made a decision you’d wake up in the middle of the night and think what was there in that decision which could potentially be criminal if a few more facts came out.”

He previously boasted how his “biggest success as a banker” was “creating an early crisis in the Channel tunnel rail link” - a contract he worked on.