SAN FRANCISCO (Legal Newsline) - California Attorney General Rob Bonta is suing a defunct charity he says misappropriated donations.
Bonta's office sued ZeroDivide, which ceased operations more than five years ago, and its officers on April 5 in San Francisco Superior Court. He claims more than $600,000 in restricted donations that weren't spent on ZeroDivide's mission of upgrading technology infrastructure for nonprofits and promoting equity in news stories.
The programs at issue are its Digital Bridge and Renaissance Journalism Center. As unrestricted donations dwindled, Bonta says ZeroDivide used money from restricted donations, funds given for a specific purpose, to cover its budget gaps elsewhere.
"Not only does borrowing restricted funds mean that ZeroDivide failed to comply with the donor-imposed restrictions, its finance policies, generally accepted accounting principles, and the law, but it created a vicious cycle of trying to replenish the borrowed restricted funds with other restricted donations received at a later date, even though unrestricted revenue was not reasonably foreseeable to pay back the restricted funds," the suit says.
Bonta says about $76,000 given by the California Wellness Foundation and The California Endowment for Digital Bridge were spent for unauthorized purposes.
The Ford Foundation, Vesper Society, Whitman Institute and Wyncote Foundation had about $530,000 of their donations spent in places other than the Renaissance Journalism Center, Bonta says.