Montrose Deceptions : Revisited
Vanessa E Foran
Principal Recovery Partners: Bankruptcy & Family Home Specialist. Accountant & PIP. Director. Writer.
In a statement,?published by the Irish Examiner, the former chair of the RTé board of directors, Moya Doherty is sticking with the?at no time?during her term did she or any other board directors have knowledge of the payments made by a third party on their behalf.?Currently only attached to one name, their biggest?outsourced contractor, Ryan Tubridy.
Its interesting that Moya Doherty is assuming what other directors knew or didn’t know.?Since they are all required to make independent decisions and be individually responsible for them, one by one, as well as ensure they are each fully informed before recording their vote. But that’s not the only hole in her statement.
Fact is, Moya Doherty can deny all she likes.?The responsibility remains exclusively tied to her and her board.?None of that board of directors during the timeline a third party was paying part of their outsourced contractors bills can release themselves from the responsibility of being a director with an excuse of ignorance.
And this is not just any board, it is the board of a Semi State Body, it is the board of the National Broadcaster and News Service, it is a board that has both a mandate from the State and a responsibility to the State. And all its citizens, not just those that pay its licence fee. It is a board that is appointed by a senior Government Minister.
What is not been said enough is that Moya Doherty is admitting that neither she nor any member of the board paid any attention to the management accounts which would have shown a pair of € 75,000 payments that hit their own general ledger.
Followed by being matched on the Bank Rec with the bank statement when the €75,000 left their account. If they missed it the first time, it was still repeated in another month’s accounts.
Significant and material because they would not have appeared on the budget for that year, unforeseen and out of the blue five figure sums would have plated up to the directors an immediate and noticeable variance in the management accounts presentation.?
It is remarkable that the Head of Finance didn’t make sure his board were aware of them with an explanation for the variances either.?However, it would be interesting to note who proposed and seconded those accounts when those charges to operations and cash were recorded.
What Moya and her board are also admitting to is that they did not know how much it was costing to run the organisation.?Or how much advertising and sponsorship income RTé was earning. Over a number of years.
Yet they and their former CEO Dee Forbes pestered the Oireachtas and the public for years insisting they needed funding, and regularly sought an increase to the television licence fee.?
In fact on the presentation of the 2019 Year End, and Covid delayed annual report, in January 2021, Moya Doherty was explicit;
The current funding model is broken, and RTé will face a material uncertainty about its capacity to provide the same level of services in the medium term if it is not resolved quickly and definitively.
As the RTé Chair was talking about a broken funding model, a number of RTé senior executives and their departments had already arranged an advertising and sponsorship partner aka the third party above, to part pay their big-ticket presenter(s) ??through what are being labelled ‘barter accounts’.?Incidentally,?barter accounts?are just showbiz for contra accounting, a technique I am not in the slightest bit surprised Deloittes couldn’t figure out, hence the need for the engagement of Grant Thornton. We now know that these?barter accounts?required a handlers fee. Like a management fee.
V.edit 02.07.2023:
We now know that these were not contra accounts, or any other type of ledger account held on the RTé General Ledger, and subject to Governance oversight, risk management, budget allocation or external audit. No transparency at all.
A financial underground was built by the very top tiers in RTé, and used by senior executives to operate a Black Fund through an external barter services company, in another jurisdiction entirely, who charged 35% of the value of each matching transaction it processed. Paid by RTé resources that were diverted, without oversight or under any policy or approved procedure, from the organisation. Resources that the senior executive floor of RTé, denied the national broadcaster use of.
Indeed:?As the RTé Chair was talking about a broken funding model, a financial underground was operating under her own nose and that of the entire board, who are appointed by a Government Minister to provide stewardship for its assets, make best use of its resources, protect the organisation, and ensure its going concern by prudence, oversight, governance, and implementing a strategy that doesn’t use the excuse of a broken funding model to explain itself.
As the RTé Chair was talking about a broken funding model, she had already overseen the false disclosures of the Montrose High Rollers contract values.
As the RTé Chair was talking about a broken funding model, she had already presented previous annual reports that did not report the full value of RTé’s advertising and sponsorship income. We now know that this under reporting of advertising and sponsorship income may have been in the region of fifty million. That’s €50,000,000 that didn’t get reported as being earned by RTé.
Whatever about the management accounts to board not being complete and accurate, there are always subject to adjustments such as year end post-audit journals, things like depreciation, fixed asset adjustments, revaluations etc. You must remember the Financial Statements published during this time came with the signatures of assurance from Deloittes that finalised and underlined their income earned from Advertising and Sponsorship.?Revenue streams that even get given their own separate lines in the notes accompanying the Auditors Report and Financial Statements.
The worst outcome in all this is not the disgrace to governance standards this board of directors have taken poll position on.
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It’s this - all that money was spent on ridiculous contracts and absurd salaries for past performances on broadcasts and shows that don’t have a repeat value or an overseas audience to sell into.
None of that spend contributed to a future return for RTé.?None of it went into strategic investment in their streaming platform the RTé Player. Nor are we seeing any investment in new finding and developing new talent or demoing pilots.?Certainly not anything that gives any promise of being enduring or re-sellable.
Nothing.?The property is its most valuable asset. Not its future or its potential. Not its news room, not its back catalogue or its work-in-progress, or scripts in-development projects, not its archive. They have no inhouse talent since we already know its expensively outsourced, no big big movie rights or script options, or even proprietary tech. An ugly building in a Dublin suburb, and its statutory permission to collect licence fees.
RTE have done nothing with the investment they got from the State, or the income they earned without competition for decades.
All the millions and millions sunk on their outside contractors bought us was a running series of deceptions.
We now own a national broadcaster with no trust left in it or a production pipeline to pin optimistic targets to.?Their new chair is far from convincing, and comes across from their own news studios as very easy to influence. Her CV confirms she is an industry insider, just like the rest of the board.?An appeaser with a cúpla focail.
Siún Ní Raghallaigh inherited a board with zero diversity of skills, experience, independence or professional qualifications, that all got there the same way she did.?Through the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.
Who must take full responsibility for their performance.?As the Cabinet members handbook says.
Currently Catherine Martin TD.?
Final point.?Ryan Tubridy and his professional management team and advisors knew RTé were not disclosing his full contract costs.?And it wasn’t just once or twice.
By saying nothing he enabled and participated in the coverup. The leading man in the Montrose deception.
He put his own reputation at risk.
Ryan Tubridy, and the others that will come out shortly, have only themselves to blame.
Greed, self-interest and ego.?It gets them all in the end.
Talent isn’t what they were all actually paid for.?
Those absurd contracts and salaries are there to sustain the inhouse production of Montrose entitlement in its upper tiers, and their ongoing generosity that doesn’t require accountability or transparency, ensures that they are all in it to squeeze as many seasons out it as they can.
Yet they will use all their publicity favours, external media connections, broadcast channels, shows and employed reporters and journalists to convince you?“the funding model”?is to blame.