In November 2012 I wrote about "Incurious" George Entwistle, who helped Auntie out of a jam by resigning from his job as Director General of the BBC after a mere 8 weeks in the position.
Auntie was so touched and overcome with gratitude that she awarded him a full year's salary of £450,000, on top of his £877,000 pension pot as a leaving present. Oddly enough Auntie's own headlines on that morning neglect to mention the pension pot.
That's a leaving present of £1.3M!
Anyhoo, here we are in September 2013 and Nanny has finally woken up to the fact that maybe this payoff and others were a tad OTT. As such, the "great and the good" from the BBC and the BBC Trust were summoned to Parliament yesterday for a wee chat with the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) over the issue of executive payoffs.
It was a "jolly" affair indeed as the BBC's high command ended up blaming each other for the mess, and refusing to acknowledge that in the real world (outwith banking) people are held accountable for payoffs to ex execs.
The Telegraph reports that during three hours of intense questioning by MPs, former Director-General Mark Thompson and Lord Patten, the chairman of the BBC Trust, repeatedly contradicted each other about the payoffs of up to £1million.
Thompson accused the BBC Trust of making “misleading” and “damaging”
comments, while the chairman of the BBC Trust said he had been accused of "having
misled the committee on something I never knew".
One BBC non-executive director claimed the pay-offs had been "value for
money", while another said that they were "eye-watering" and
part of a culture of extravagance at the corporation.
Margaret Hodge, chairman of PAC, described the appearance by the BBC executives as "grossly unedifying" and said it could only “damage the standing and reputation" of the BBC.
“At the best I think what we have seen is incompetence, a lack of central control, a failure to communicate. At its worse we may have seen people covering their backs by being less than open.”Nothing new there then in Nanny's and Auntie's world!
Nice to see our licence fees being so "wisely" used!
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I am not a fan of the modern BBC and it's leftie bias.
ReplyDeleteI am also not a fan of Ms Hodge and the way she takes it upon herself to attack business and profits at every opportunity however, I actually agree with her on this story.
I think it is high time that the license fee is scrapped and the state's broadcaster has to fend for itself.....Let's see how long it lasts with its pro left, pro EUSSR, pro false new religion of climate change and PC agenda, when it cannot dip into everyone's pockets to fund it.