LAST UPDATE | 26 Jun 2023
RTÉ IS SET to appear before two Oireachtas committees this week to answer questions in relation to the controversy surrounding undisclosed payments to Ryan Tubridy.
The controversy arose after it was revealed on Thursday of last week that Tubridy, RTÉ’s highest paid star, earned an extra €345,000 over the course of over six years than RTÉ had previously disclosed.
Tubridy’s annual earnings published by RTÉ between the years 2017-2022 ranged from €440,000-€491,667 but a review carried out by Grant Thornton found that his annual earnings from RTÉ in those years actually ranged from €511,667-€545,000.
The issue was partly the result of a deal which saw Tubridy receive additional income from commercial partner Renault, with that income guaranteed and underwritten by RTÉ.
The manner in which these payments were recorded led to an understatement of his earnings, with RTÉ apologising for the mistake. Tubridy himself apologised on Friday for ‘not questioning’ the published figures.
Representatives of the RTÉ board and executive will appear before the Oireachtas Media Committee and the Public Accounts Committee on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively.
In a statement today, the board said that it will issue a comprehensive statement tomorrow afternoon, which will set out its “understanding of the circumstances surrounding the misstating of Ryan Tubridy’s earnings across the 2020-2022 period.”
The statement said that RTÉ would also publish “as much as possible of the Grant Thornton review, which was commissioned by the Audit and Risk Committee of the RTÉ Board”.
These are some of the questions that they will be seeking answers to.
Undisclosed payments totalling €345,000 were paid to Ryan Tubridy between 2017 and March of this year.
In its initial statement, RTÉ said a routine audit in late March had picked up the issue in relation to payments to Tubridy and commissioned accountants Grant Thornton to carry out an independent review to establish the facts.
RTÉ’s audit and risk committee received the report on Friday 16 June and the issue was discussed by the RTÉ board on Monday 19 June, before its statement was issued last Thursday.
Why it took six years for a routine audit to pick up the issue is one question that will likely be asked of RTÉ later this week.
However, the more pressing question in relation to this is who knew about the payments, when did they know, who approved them and who knew that the figures being published by RTÉ every year were incorrect?
“We really want to get to the bottom of who made the decisions, most definitely,” Catherine Murphy, Social Democrats TD and vice chair of the Public Accounts Committee, told The Journal.
“It was mired in secrecy. That appears to me to have been intended… Was it intended to keep this secret because they wanted to say that there was a 15% reduction across the board in people who were the higher earners?
“When RTÉ last met the Public Accounts Committee, were the people that met that committee aware of the fact that they were giving misleading or wrong information to the Public Accounts Committee and by extension, the public?”
In a statement this morning, former RTÉ director general Dee Forbes accepted that she “led discussions” in 2020 around the renewal of Tubridy’s contract with his agent “together with other RTÉ senior executives”. She did not name the executives.
“Following detailed discussions including numerous internal communications over many months with RTÉ colleagues, including finance and legal colleagues, an agreement was reached which delivered cost savings for RTÉ,” she said.
Forbes said RTÉ “were attempting to retain Ryan Tubridy’s services as a valued presenter and negotiate a new contract, with the agreed 15% cost cutting target in mind”.
It is unclear whether there was a counter-offer for Tubridy to work elsewhere.
Moya Doherty has clarified that she was unaware of the payments during her tenure as Chair of the RTÉ board.
“Up until I concluded my term as Chair in November, 2022, I was not made aware of the issue relating to these payments. I, and my colleagues on the Board, should have been comprehensively briefed on all aspects of the payments and the manner in which they were dealt with in the accounts. The issue did not emerge until after an audit of the 2022 accounts,” she said.
Tubridy entered into an agreement with commercial partner Renault where he would receive €75,000 per year for a number of personal appearances.
RTÉ agreed to underwrite the annual payment to Tubridy, which was a top-up of his annual salary of €440,000 for his role as a presenter.
When Renault decided not to renew the contract after 2020, RTÉ made payments to Tubridy’s agent, Noel Kelly, on the broadcaster’s behalf.
According to Sinn Féin TD Brian Stanley, who is the chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the question of why RTÉ felt the need to underwrite the payments to Tubridy is one that needs to be answered.
“There’s two thing that lacks credibility in it,” he told The Journal.
“The first thing is the fact that the station would have to underwrite it to hold onto him is ridiculous. If the commercial entity is not prepared to give you the money for it, that’s fine. That’s the decision they have taken. You’re not entitled to it.
“The second thing that’s off the wall about it is for two of those years, [Tubridy] was on €495,000. The thought that you would have to give anybody in a State with less than 5 million people more than €495,000 to hold on to them to do a show in the morning for an hour and to do The Late Late Show on a Friday night is absurd.”
RTÉ’s initial statement said it was focused on “achieving cost savings due to the wider financial circumstances of the organisation” and its commitment to “reduce the fees paid to RTÉ’s top 10 most highly paid on air presenters by 15%”.
The payments made by Renault to Tubridy would have allowed RTÉ to say he was paid less than €500,000, despite the fact that he was paid more than this sum annually between 2017 and 2022.
When RTÉ made the additional payments of €75,000 to Tubridy after Renault did not renew the agreement, it failed to disclose that it was paying Tubridy more than the figures it had published.
Why this was not corrected will likely be asked of the broadcaster’s representatives this week.
RTÉ has not yet said how or why Tubridy’s salary was under-reported from 2017 to 2019.
In her resignation statement, Forbes clarified that she has “no knowledge” of payments made to Tubridy between 2017 and 2019 and that the RTÉ board had not raised the question of these payments with her.
Murphy said that the Public Accounts Committee will have questions for RTÉ about these payments.
“Dee Forbes has said that she had no knowledge of that. Well, that didn’t happen by accident. Somebody would have made a decision on that,” she said.
“When you listen to people who work in RTÉ, they will tell you that even the most tiny amounts of expenditure are gone through in considerable detail. How could such large amounts of money have been sanctioned without the kind of controls or due diligence that has been demanded of others within the organisation?”
In a statement, the RTÉ board said the circumstances that led to this understatement in Tubridy’s earnings are currently under examination.
“As per the RTÉ Board statement last Thursday, the circumstances that led to the misstatement of Ryan Tubridy’s earnings from 2017-2019 are separately being reviewed by Grant Thornton and therefore will not be included in tomorrow’s statement,” it said.
Payments to Tubridy were made via a barter account, which are used by companies to exchange goods or services for other goods or services.
Barter accounts are often operated by intermediaries, who charge fees. In this case, RTÉ spent an additional €80,000 in fees to the intermediary, on top of the €150,000 that was paid to Tubridy.
“€150,000 was paid to Mr. Tubridy’s agent (on his behalf) from the barter account in 2022. This related to the guaranteed income for 2021 and 2022. It resulted in an overall cost to RTÉ, from this account, of €230,760 (inclusive of fees incurred through the barter account process),” RTÉ’s initial statement said.
The Sunday Times has reported that Noel Kelly was instructed to generate two invoices for 2021 and 2022 not to be made out to RTÉ, but to Astus, a London media company”.
“Kelly did as requested and generated two invoices for €75,000 each on behalf of CMS Marketing, on different dates, and sent them to RTÉ. The invoices were given codes 11416 and 11526. They stipulated that the monies were to be paid into an AIB account controlled by CMS. RTÉ forwarded the invoices to the London firm,” the paper wrote.
It said suspicions were raised when Astus sent RTE a statement that referred to one of the payments marked “consultancy services” in May 2022.
“No one seemed to be able to explain what services Astus was paying for or who had authorised the payments,” it continued.
“Astus acted at all times in good faith and there is also no suggestion of any wrongdoing on the part of either Kelly or Tubridy.”
In the wake of the revelations, Arts Minister Catherine Martin said that an external review commissioned by RTÉ into the remuneration of its top 10 highest paid presenters will be concluded within two weeks.
Stanley said that “one of the most pressing questions” is whether there are similar deals ongoing with other RTÉ presenters.
“What other deals there are? How much will Patrick Kielty be paid? Is there any kind of additional payment similar to the case with Ryan Tubridy, with him or with any of the other presenters?”
Murphy said she would be “absolutely astonished if this is a one-off”.
This morning, RTÉ broadcaster Claire Byrne made clear on her radio programme that she has never sought any “side deal” in her contracts with the national broadcaster and outlined the details of her recent salaries in what she called an attempt to be “open and honest” on the topic.
She said her most recently published annual salary of €350,000 is “correct, as are those published in the past” and that her salary at present is €280,000 due to her stepping away from her Monday night television show.
After the story broke, Tubridy released a statement to say he was “surprised” by RTÉ’s announcement.
He further stated that he couldn’t “shed any light on why RTÉ treated these payments in the way that they did nor can I answer for their mistakes in this regard”.
However, the following day, Tubridy issued a further statement clarifying that he was aware of the arrangement and “should have asked questions” at the time, but he did not address why he didn’t do so.
The question of whether Tubridy knew that the figures RTÉ published each year from 2017 to 2022 weren’t accurate remains. If he did, why didn’t he make it known that the figure was, in fact, higher than reported?
And why did he claim to be “surprised” by the announcement if he knew about the arrangement?
An external review into governance and culture at RTÉ was announced by Minister Martin at the weekend. It is expected to take seven months.
Murphy said it is “difficult to know” what comes next for the national broadcaster.
“The thing about it is when you’re in the middle of a crisis, the only thing that you focus on is the crisis. I think how RTÉ come out of this will have a bearing on that, and that’s why this is high stakes,” she said.
She added that who answers the questions later this week will be critical.
“It will certainly be counterproductive for RTÉ, for the public and for the wider staff who had no involvement in this, if the people who come along to those scheduled meetings for Wednesday and Thursday are not the people who can answer those questions, and are people that are new to positions and say, ‘well, this is happened before I took a position’.
“We can’t have that. We can’t have people appearing and then not answering the questions that are put to them. That will actually make matters worse, I think.
“For an organisation that’s in the communications business, I would expect that they’d be more than aware that it would be critically important that there’s candour.”
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