Spring 2004

In our last issue we highlighted the amazing story of former ISKCON Guru, Harikesa Swami, who for years had been falsely posing as a completely renounced sannyasi and initiating Guru, yet somehow amassed enough money to buy a luxury villa on the French Riviera worth over a million dollars.
Stories like this prove that ISKCON's bogus Guru system is an open invitation for huge financial abuse. On the strength of their artificially inflated, special status, the unauthorised Gurus in ISKCON are able to attract vast sums of money from their hapless disciples that should rightly go to the direct service of Srila Prabhupada's institution.
Even the corrupt and self-serving GBC, most of whom are themselves posing as initiating Gurus, realised that this problem needed at least some cosmetic attention in order to make it appear that they were policing the situation.
After allowing themselves and their cohorts totally unfettered access to potentially vast fortunes for over twenty years, they finally made the following half-hearted and unpublished resolution in April 2000:
 

We said the above measure was "half-hearted" since there was absolutely no mechanism put in place for compelling the Gurus to comply, nor any system for verifying if such reports were accurate. However, even this weak, unenforceable and unverifiable request was totally ignored by most of the 80 or so ISKCON Gurus. The following exchange shows just what some ISKCON Gurus think about greater accountability and transparency. It starts with Jayadvaita Swami (himself an unauthorised Guru) pointing out that hardly any other Gurus had bothered filing financial reports:

And here is the curt response from another unauthorised Guru Trivikrama Swami, who apparently runs his own flea-market business in spite of posing as a renounced sannyasi. His response shows how his non-compliance with the GBC's resolution was not due to some accidental administrative oversight, but rather pure contempt for the very concept:

So there you have it from the horse's mouth. He complains about not being paid a wage, even though that is the very definition of a sannyasi, and then adamantly refuses to give any account of his income to the very institution he illegally uses as a hunting ground for new disciples and the resultant Guru-daksina (donations from disciples).
Even Gauri Das, President at Bhaktivedanta Manor, who we featured previously as a fanatical and outspoken supporter of ISKCON's deviant Gurus and intimidator of all those who want reform, expressed some bewildered concern at this glaring impropriety:

Above, Gauri Das not only questions Trivikrama Swami's response, but also discloses the fact that Bhaktivedanta Manor recently had to pay a vast sum of money to help bail out the child abuse court case currently under way in the US: "Recently we had to contribute $60,000 to the legal case in USA." We wonder if Gauri Das has himself disclosed this fact to the many Patrons and congregational members of Bhaktivedanta Manor whose temple donations have been used in such a way? We also wonder if he has told them that ISKCON Gurus were amongst those accused of abusing children? Gauri Das then makes a reasonably accurate prediction:

The good news: having been stung into action by the above exchanges, and perhaps fearful of an IRM expose, more Gurus fled reports this year than any year previous.

The bad news: only about half the Gurus filed reports, and those that were filed fell way below any sort of professional accounting standard. Given past experience, and the above reaction from Trivikrama Swami, it is very hard to place much faith in such "accounts". It is clear from Jayadvaita Swami's summary of this year's performance that even he has his doubts:

So we have a situation where a large number of people are falsely claiming Srila Prabhupada's disciples for themselves, making loads of money in the process, and then refusing to give proper accounts for their illegal behaviour. Not only this, but even the unrevealing accounts that are filed will never be checked by anyone, ever!

One might ask why anyone in the renounced order, serving within ISKCON, should have any assets in their own name at all? Surely everything should be in the name of ISKCON, and properly accounted for? Yet it has taken these so-called Gurus nearly three decades of unregulated money grabbing for it to even dawn on them that something might be wrong. The main problem is their false initiator Guru status, since this blinds them and their blind followers to that which should be blindingly obvious: in ISKCON all assets belong to Srila Prabhupada, including money and disciples. Until this deviation is rectified it is hard to see things improving.