RTÉ finance chief did not have oversight of controversial ‘barter account’, says station

RTÉ's chief financial officer did not have oversight of the controversial “barter account” associated with the hidden payments to Ryan Tubridy, the broadcaster has said.

However, the finance chief did have access to the account when compiling the annual financial accounts for the years 2020 to 2022 and the controversial transactions were recorded as a “year-end adjustment”. The transactions were not recorded in the station’s monthly management accounts, it said.

RTÉ has been thrown into crisis by the disclosure last week that the amounts paid to Tubridy in the years since 2017 were significantly greater than was publicly disclosed.

It emerged that two payments of €75,000 each, in relation to 2021 and 2022, were paid to the presenter’s agent by way of a barter account linked to a system through which the station used advertising space to pay for certain goods and services.

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The trading of advertising space for goods and services was done by way of a London-based media bartering agency called Astus. According to a report in The Sunday Times, invoices from CMS Marketing, a business owned by Irish agent Noel Kelly, and relating to the €75,000 payments to Tubridy, were sent by RTÉ to Astus and paid out of the barter account to his agent.

The invoices, according to the report, did not refer to Tubridy but instead referred to “consultancy services”.

During a routine audit of the 2022 accounts “an issue” was identified in relation to the “transparency of certain payments”, according to RTÉ. In time, it led to the secret payments to Tubridy coming to the attention of the RTÉ board and eventually the public.

Last week, the station said that since the controversial payments came to light the barter account has been brought under the control of the RTÉ finance function and specific controls put in place.

‘Whistleblower’

In a report in the Sunday Independent, an unidentified “industry whistleblower” was quoted as saying that the account used to pay Tubridy had been involved in transactions with advertising agencies totalling €50 million over the past 10 years.

In response to the article, RTÉ said it records its total commercial revenue net of any commission or volume discounts in its annual accounts and that its auditors review commercial income as part of their work. “No issues have been raised in relation to controls over volume discounts,” it said.

It said more than 90 per cent of its advertising and sponsorship revenue comes from negotiated contracts with media-buying agencies that are offered an industry standard 15 per cent commission.

According to the report in the Sunday Times, the cost to RTÉ of the €150,000 paid to Tubridy arising from the two invoices was €230,760, and this included fees paid to other parties as part of the transactions. Media bartering companies trade in media advertising space and goods and services produced by other clients, and charge fees for the transactions they process.

Agents such as Mr Kelly charge a standard fee of 15 per cent of what is paid to his clients, according to public speaker and former politician Ivan Yates, who uses the services of Mr Kelly and other agents in his work as a speaker at award ceremonies and other commercial events. “That is the model. It is totally incentivised to drive income,” he said.

Two Oireachtas committees have called on members of the RTÉ board and executive to appear before them this week to shed further light on the controversy. The currently suspended director general, Dee Forbes, is among those who have been asked to appear but it is not yet known if she intends to do so.

Requests for a comment to Mr Kelly and to Ms Forbes met with no response. There is no suggestion that Astus, which is a major international media bartering business, was aware what lay behind the invoices from CMS Marketing that were used to facilitate the payments to Tubridy. Attempts to get a comment from the company were unsuccessful on Sunday.

NUJ concern

The total paid to Tubridy over the period since 2017 was €345,000 more than was publicly stated by RTÉ when disclosing the level of fees paid to its highest-paid presenters. It is not known how the excess payments were processed in the period prior to 2020. A payment of €75,000 Mr Tubridy in 2020 occurred by way of an arrangement between the broadcaster and Renault, sponsor of the Late Late Show, with the car manufacturer getting a discount on its dealings with RTÉ as part of the deal.

The external investigation into RTÉ that Minister for the Arts Catherine Martin has commissioned was welcome but “should not be used as a reason to further delay the wider reform of public service broadcasting in Ireland”, the Irish secretary of the National Union of Journalists, Séamus Dooley, said on Sunday.

He urged public representatives at the coming Oireachtas committee hearings to “resist the temptation to deliver a punishment beating to RTÉ which could harm independent producers, national and regional media outlets including TG4 and to employees in the broadcasting sector”.

He said the union had a concern about the “apparent intention not to proceed with the implementation of a new public service broadcasting model in Ireland” until the investigation to be commissioned by Ms Martin is completed.

“There needs to be a balance between addressing the corporate governance failures in RTÉ and ensuring that those who serve the public through their work are given the resources to do so,” he said.