RTÉ admits paying Tubridy €345,000 more than declared

The problem with Marty is that he may not have done anything egregiously wrong yet nobody on the up would have quickly returned the car and been wushu washy with their explanation. He deserves a bit of a suspension for sure and some further disciplinary action due, at least, casting disrepute on his employer.

What makes it worse however is the new DG falling in quickly to cover his buddy and insisting no damage has been caused when the dogs in the street can see the issue. Worse again are the GAAregukars falling in as well to exhknerate tge ‘grabs hardworking fella’ of any wrongdoing. The only message this ends up getting across is you can do whet you like as long as you have pull and when you’re found out the lads will all dig you out and the thickish at home will be convinced.

Thid is why RTE is rotten and why Bakhurst is the wrong man at the wrong time. It’s day 1 only. It can only get worse. We shouldn’t be accepting MMs rubbish. We shouldn’t be accepting anyone else defending him by saying “He’s a great GAA man etc.”. That has nothing to do with the fact he’s dodgy in this regard.

There’s too much of this in this country. Until this changes we’ll just keep handing out firgivehess cards to the same cabal of idiots who will ream us over and over again.

Heh, another one.

The more I think about it - the only way RTE can survive and come out of this stronger is if Kevin is only an “interim DG”.

He needs to be courageous enough to make really tough decisions and not care about the consequences.

he needs to hang people out to dry

the longer he remains DG - the less likely there will be improvements.

He did escalate it to the board - he brought it to Forbes the DG and head of the board. What can you do when the DG and most of the existing board are up to their neck in it?

Its you who are clueless.

He would say that wouldn't he about someone who helped achieve huge pay deals over the years. A clear conflict of interest from Kenny.

Fair enough but that's the risk / reward equation assessed by these brands and on balance it was determined the benefits outweighed the risks. Only for RTE acting the bollix that determination would probably still be accurate.

Of course the Q is would the people swayed by Marty driving a Renault be disuaded from driving the same car arising from recent revelations. Over to the marketing gurus to give their professional opinion on the market wide impact. Certainly in my case it's an irrelevant issue, I would just as likely buy one now as before

In your post, it feels like you are putting this on Collins, and have relatively little to say about O'Keefe.

For the record, the barter account was 6 or 7 years in operation under O'Keefe, and if it was set up in 2014 as some alleged, was set up on her watch. It was always off the books under her watch, never open to scrutiny and as she said herself she never mentioned or discussed the barter account with Collins.

No no no no you are completely out of your depth here.

He DID NOT escalate anything. When queried about the payment by the auditor he asked the DG about it and then relayed that explanation to the auditors. That's it.

That's all he did.

What he should have done - in his role of CFO and to fulfill his basic responsibilities - none of which he did:

• immediately get all transactions off the barter account and have someone in the team investigate them
• prepared executive summary of the transactions
• set out basic corrective action points about what finance would do around these and what new controls and processed he'd put in place to make sure they didn't happen again
• send this executive summary and summary of the issues found and correction actions to a) external auditors b) chairman of the RTE board c) chairman of the internal audit committee and d) government minister
• all of that would have been done easily comprehensively within 1 working week

The barter account being off the books - that is on O'Keefe. However the use of the barter account seemed to be on extravagant junkets \ hospitality for advertisiers (and RTE commercial flunkies).

The use of the barter account in this way to funnel under the counter payments to Tubridy semes to be AFTER O'Keefes watch and based on her public statement, she would not have stood for its use in that way.

That is on Collins.

Does that square the circle?

The DG is appointed by the RTE Board. In the exact same way that a company's CEO would be appointed by the Board of Directors.

Reflecting on Kevin's first actions, I think he will come to regret letting Marty motor on (no pun intended) as usual. The notion of letting Marty away with having a freebie car for five or six years without consequences is illogical. What use is having a Register of Interests going to be??

He was still a massive improvement on O'Keefe who made sure none of this was ever meant to see the light of day.

Lynch has been handed the job of dealing with it...

It's just that you're repeatedly ignoring some of the facts.

1. The CFO has ultimate responsibility for the company accounts. This is such a given it just shouldn't be in dispute at all. No one is saying that they need to know where every cent is going in real-time. But once they know about something shady, they should act upon it immediately and decisively.
2. He didn't follow proper corporate governance procedures. Blindly accepting a lame excuse from your CEO is not how a CFO should ever operate. They're in an Executive role for a reason.