The Director General of RTÉ Dee Forbes has been suspended after revelations that star host Ryan Tubridy was paid 345,000 in undeclared earnings between 2017 and 2022.
The decision to suspend Forbes was made yesterday with former RTÉ board chair Moya Doherty claiming that she and the other board members had no knowledge of the undeclared payments.
“At no time during my tenure as Chair of the RTE Board did I, or other members of the Board, have knowledge of any issue relating to certain payments and the profoundly serious lack of transparency involved.”
“The matters which have come to light go to the heart of a failure of good corporate governance.” she said
Independent TD Michael McNamara has called for the TV licence and the board of RTÉ to be scrapped in the wake of the scandal.
The RTÉ board has to go. The licence fee has to go.
— Michael McNamara TD (@MlMcNamaraTD) June 22, 2023
Speaking on Morning Ireland Sinn Féin TD Brian Stanley called the situation “shocking” saying, “This is not the way you do accounts,”
“When you deliberately seek to misrepresent the accounts for whatever sum of money, 345,000 in this case, that’s actually fraudulent accountancy,” he said
He continued that the national broadcaster was not “Del boy and Rodney” and had given assurance before the Oireachtas that the pay of the top 10 presenters was being reduced.
“Not alone did that not happen in this case” he said adding that in fact tens of thousands of euro had been added on and “concealed” at a time when RTÉ senior management were “pleading” for more money at an Oireachtas Joint Committee of which he is a member.
“We need to know who set this up, and who signed off on it and who knew about it, who gave it the green light and why were we misled? Not once, but a number of times by the senior people in RTÉ, including Dee Forbes, and are there other cases out there at the moment,” he said.
He questioned why it has taken six years for the financial irregularities to be discovered by an internal audit saying there were “huge questions” around “ governance and accountability” within the national broadcaster.
Stanley said Dee Forbes needed to come forward and explain her role in the payments noting that he believes she is on the RTÉ payroll until the 10th of July