Counsel of despair

I was idling around with the accounts of Ray's Brain Trust "charity" yesterday and I found myself looking at some of the donations that it made in the year to March 2016

and in particular the five grand, plus a grand or so the year before, that the Trustees of the Brain Trust (Tony, Ray's sister, Ray's son, Ray, a couple of Ray's mates)

saw fit to donate to an organisation called World IQ Counsel Ltd.

This is one of the grants mentioned in the section relating to "transactions with related parties" (the one curiously missing from the next year's accounts).

Odd, in an amusing kind of way, that they've forgotten Ray's OBE on the line above, but there's also something odd about the company in the entry we've highlighted. But before we get on to that, who might World IQ Counsel be? Ray, obviously, who else?

They're a company that's now called Intelligent Resources And Services Limited to which they changed their name in July 2016. They have two directors, one of whom is Ray, who was the sole director at the time under discussion. The other, appointed after the change of name, is a gentleman called Don Morris.

If you think you've heard that name before, it's quite likely that you have: a Don Morris co-authored Ray's book on the 2000 match

Introduction by Tony Blair? I never knew

which was memorably reviewed by Steve Giddins in Kingpin. Anyway, I was interested to see that name pop up, what with another name from the Brain Games days popping up yesterday.

There's a couple of other things to note about World IQ Counsel / Intelligent Resources And Services Limited.

One is that it's a dormant company, according to its accounts for the year ending 31 March 2017. The other thing is that, as those accounts also state:

The company is dormant and has not commenced trading [my emphasis - ejh].

So if you've followed this far, you may be asking yourself this. If this company never commenced trading, what particular projects was it undertaking, when it received more than six thousand pounds, from registered charity the Brain Trust, other than the project of being headed by Ray Keene of the Brain Trust?