James Middleton's gift company Boomf unwittingly created boxes plastered with Nazi swastikas and anti-Semitic images to be shipped to customers (5 Pics)
The company of Prince William's brother-in-law is allowing Nazi propaganda and anti-Semitic hate mail to be peddled through it, MailOnline can reveal today.
The Nazi hate mail is being printed on personalised gift boxes at a company owned by Kate Middleton's younger brother, an investigation sparked by a former employee has revealed.
The whistleblower revealed how James Middleton's gift company Boomf - based in the Berkshire village of Ashampstead Common - shipped out a confetti-filled box with a swastika, even after it was pointed out that it could be a hate crime.
As part of an investigation, a news agency ordered a similar Boomf box featuring a swastika and other offensive imagery, which was received as requested last week.
The Boomf box was designed to be obviously unacceptable to test whether Boomf responsibly cancelled orders, which the firm's terms and conditions state it can do.
But the company still produced the box, which includes the image of a swastika, concentration camp gates, Jewish graves and the neo-Nazi slogan 'Blood and Soil'.
A Boomf spokesman told MailOnline: 'This should not have happened. We are a small company processing over half a million images a week, but we are reviewing our policies and processes to make sure this cannot happen again.'
It follows allegations made by the whistleblower, who was employed as an agency worker before Christmas and said she was 'disappointed' in the Middleton family.
In a freezing warehouse, the woman, aged in her 40s, was one of around 20 agency workers brought in to help the ten to 12 permanent employees at Boomf.
The woman picked up a box to assemble on December 14, 2018 and was horrified when she started to put it together and gradually realised one of the four sides had an anti-Semitic symbol on it.
The whistleblower, who asked not to be identified, said: 'The pictures on the box were a homemade swastika cake which was coloured. One hundred percent it was a Nazi swastika. It was red, white and black. There were also a couple of emojis, one of them was the poo emoji.
'One of them was a toothless old man in black and white, and one of them was a gravestone. It was a shaped gravestone. I thought they looked like Jewish gravestones. Normally when the boxes come through, the pictures tell a story.
'A Christmas one could be a kiddie growing up, marriage proposals, will you be my bridesmaid, that sort of stuff.
'But on this one there was none, it was just odd. There wasn't any personal message, which was unusual. I wasn't sure if it was a joke, but there was nothing obvious to make it clear it was.
'I took it up to the office and gave it to one of the office staff - three young girls in their 20s. They didn't like any of the agency workers, some of whom were Eastern European. They tarred us all with the same brush. So when I went up there they did sort of look at me like I didn't have a brain cell in my body.
'I showed them the box and said the words, 'does this come under hate crime?'
'They said, 'we'll email the client', and the one supervisor, a former permanent employee who rose up the ranks, was there and they all conferred on it. But it still got sent out.
'Literally someone walked out of the door behind me, took it downstairs, and gave it to another worker to send out. They took it straight back to where I'd just been working and gave it to the person who was almost sat next to me.
'The person they gave it to put it in the envelope and I watched it go through the post rack. It then goes to post and the post gets collected twice a day. It went out, 100 per cent it went out.
'I doubt they'll even remember having a conversation with me about it, which is even worse. It was almost just like it wasn't worth the hassle of dealing with it. They've paid for it, the order's been done, just send it out.'
An analysis of Boomf's terms and conditions reveals the company has the ability to cancel orders if users on their website upload images they deem unacceptable.
The whistleblower worked for three weeks at Boomf, earning £8.12 an hour from 8am to 5pm during the run-up to Christmas. It is situated alongside Carole Middleton's Party Pieces firm.
After her experience she walked out of Boomf on December 15 and did not return, despite being asked to by her agency, because she felt disappointed with the Middleton family.
She said: 'It just bugged me, I left there and didn't bother going back. I don't feel as bad about it as I would if I'd actually put it in the envelope and sent it out myself, because then I've got that on my mind. That could land on some war hero's doorstep and I'd have been part of that.
'The person that owns it is James Middleton. These are the in-laws of our future King. Of all people I think they should be more aware of what's going in and out.
'Where we live, they do have quite a degree of stature around here, we know Carol Middleton from Party Pieces, you'd think they'd take that extra precaution of training their staff.'
Mr Middleton founded Boomf in November 2013 and is listed on the company website as 'Chief Wonka' and pictured with a mad-hatter style hat, a reference to Roald Dahl's eponymous chocolate factory owner. He is an active director and owns 32 per cent of the company.
The 31-year-old's company recorded losses of £3million between 2015 and 2018. The whistleblower said he only came in once from his Chelsea address in London to visit the site of Boomf while she was there.
She said: 'James came in once. He literally breezed in, I only know him because I Googled him. You could see when he came in, he came in with his posh Land Rover and his Chelsea boots.
'Swanned around for about five minutes and then left and in the three weeks we were there only ever saw him for about ten minutes.
'When he walked in the door, the first thing I said was that's gotta be James Middleton because he's still got his silver spoon in his mouth.
'He had Louis Vuitton boots on and Armani jeans. The rest of us had 20 layers and woolly hats and thermal gloves on. He had a Ralph Lauren shirt and was all 'look at me', swinging his Range Rover keys about.'
Mr Middleton's business is situated in a barn which is split in half and has a shared tenancy with a pork scratchings company called Snaffling Pig, which secured backing from Nick Jenkins, the founder of Moonpig.com and a Dragon on the BBC show Dragons' Den, who is an active director of Boomf, after leading a round of investment in 2014. He owns 65,741 shares, or 4.6 per cent of the company).
The company also has the backing of James Matthews, the husband of Pippa Middleton, who owns 12,853 shares.
The whistleblower added: 'It was the worst place in the world to work around Christmas-time. I've worked in hospitality for 30 years and it was novel.
'Underneath all the desks they've got plug-in fan heaters which cut out all the time and the lights go and the electrics go because they're using too much power.
'By our second day there we learned to go in with thermals. We took blankets for our legs, the whole lot.'
