{"id":232742,"date":"2025-10-29T21:09:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-29T21:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/232742\/"},"modified":"2025-10-29T21:09:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T21:09:08","slug":"historic-rte-pension-top-ups-were-approved-says-bakhurst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/232742\/","title":{"rendered":"Historic RT\u00c9 pension top-ups were approved, says Bakhurst"},"content":{"rendered":"

RT\u00c9 Director General Kevin Bakhurst has said that while some historic pension top-ups were approved at the time, the issue is how they were reported in RT\u00c9’s “balance sheet”.<\/p>\n

“It’s not true to say they weren’t approved; they were approved, some of these leaks have actually got that incorrect,” he said.<\/p>\n

The pension payments, a disputed ownership of a piece of art in RT\u00c9’s possession and the unclear status of a portion of land on the RT\u00c9 site came to light as part of a recent examination of RT\u00c9’s 2024 accounts.<\/p>\n

RT\u00c9 has said that four of the payments are decades old and the others were made as part of early retirement programmes in 2017 and 2021.<\/p>\n

Speaking to RT\u00c9’s Drivetime Mr Bakhurst said that they were “all correctly approved at the time,” adding that the issue was how they were reported in the organisation’s balance sheet.<\/p>\n

“When our finance director went through the balance sheet, she felt we had to make a slightly higher provision for these pensions than we made.<\/p>\n

“But they were always there in the report; they were all approved correctly at the time, to the best of our knowledge,” he said.<\/p>\n

Mr Bakhurst said that there were eight individuals, the first four of who are “very historical, they are decades old…three of those people are now aged over 90, one of them is aged over 100”.<\/p>\n

He added: “They are very historical pension things that were agreed many years ago.”<\/p>\n

Mr Bakhurst said the other four related to voluntary retirement in the last couple of RT\u00c9 exit schemes, and not executive staff, and they were “proper agreements, as far as I’m aware, and we’ve looked into them”.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nKevin Bakhurst said historic pension top-ups were approved<\/p>\n

The director general explained that people decide to leave, and they receive a payment until they retire.<\/p>\n

“And those payments are not huge; they are somewhere between \u20ac10,000 and \u20ac14,000 per person per year for a few years.<\/p>\n

“And of those four people, I think three of them will have retired by this time next year,” he said.<\/p>\n

However, Minister for Arts, Culture and Media Patrick O’Donovan has said he wants to hear more from RT\u00c9 about the series of pension payments.<\/p>\n

In a note to staff yesterday, Mr Bakhurst said the payments referred to were historically recorded on RT\u00c9’s balance sheet and details were brought to the attention of the department.<\/p>\n

Regarding the art piece, he said RT\u00c9 is currently seeking to establish ownership of the piece, while the section of land was originally used by the Department of Post and Telegraphs.<\/p>\n

The land is around one acre in size and is situated on the corner of the Stillorgan dual carriageway and Nutley Lane.<\/p>\n

The station’s annual report, published this afternoon, shows it recorded a surplus of \u20ac5.5m last year, but it was supported by \u20ac48m in Government funding.<\/a><\/p>\n

The report showed that in 2024, there was one severance payment including a contribution to legal fees agreed with a former member of the previous executive board with a total cost of \u20ac475,000.<\/p>\n

Mr O’Donovan said the severance payment struck him as “very high”, and he would “absolutely” be asking about it at a scheduled meeting with the Chairman of the RT\u00c9 Board on 6 November, as well as other issues that have been highlighted, including land at RT\u00c9.<\/p>\n

We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences<\/a><\/p>\n

Speaking to RT\u00c9\u2019s News at One, Mr O’Donovan said he wanted to “acknowledge” the work of RT\u00c9’s current Chief Financial Officer in “preparing the reports” and bringing attention to “some legacy issues”.<\/p>\n

“The CFO, the Chief Financial Officer, has been going through in deep detail some of the issues she encountered,” he said.<\/p>\n

Mr O’Donovan said the land issue “may now have an impact on the future development of the campus”.<\/p>\n

He said the acre was “given in short-term use” to Eircom a number of years ago but “now obviously the ownership of that is an issue”.<\/p>\n

“And there’s obviously then as well some tax issues with regard to personnel abroad,” Mr O\u2019Donovan said.<\/p>\n

Mr O’Donovan said that as the minister responsible for RT\u00c9, he wants to “be able to stand full-square” behind the current management and Executive, who he said are “doing a very good job in the backdrop of what was a cataclysmic situation in RT\u00c9 in terms of transformation”.<\/p>\n

Mr O’Donovan also said some of the issues around the payments he wants to know more about “will be fairly straightforward” but he “needs to know and satisfy” himself that pension payments made to “survivors and widows” were done “properly”.<\/p>\n

He said he brought RT\u00c9’s annual report before the Cabinet because “there’s a lot of media reports around it, so I wanted to get it approved and published as soon as possible”.<\/p>\n

He described the latest issues as “legacy issues” that “predate” the current RT\u00c9 management team and Board but said “nonetheless they are issues that need I think to be aired”.<\/p>\n

He said the support that has been given to RT\u00c9 is “substantial”.<\/p>\n

“Public funding is at about \u20ac222.3m, up from \u20ac193m in 2023.<\/p>\n

“So it’s a \u20ac29m increase in public sector funding for RT\u00c9 and at the same time we’ve seen the licence fee fall by \u20ac4m,” Mr O\u2019Donovan added.<\/p>\n

\"Portrait
\nRT\u00c9 is currently seeking to establish ownership of the art piece<\/p>\n

Licence fee<\/p>\n

According to RT\u00c9’s annual report, income from the licence fee dropped \u20ac4 million last year compared to 2023.<\/p>\n

Minister O’Donovan said it was too early to say whether there has been a recovery this year in television licence fee receipts but he hoped to have more information “before the end of the year”.<\/p>\n

He said the best awareness that can be provided to inform people of the importance of paying the TV licence is “having a public sector broadcaster that we value as part of our democracy”.<\/p>\n

“This is something that we all have an obligation to pay for…that needs to be funded, and people who own a television need to put their hand in their pocket and pay for the television licence,” he added.<\/p>\n

In relation to staff departures from RT\u00c9, Minister O’Donovan said he hoped the broadcaster would “live up” to its target of 100 departures by the end of the year, and its overall target of 400.<\/p>\n

He said the Government “came good” with the amount of money it had to “pony up to keep RT\u00c9 afloat…but that support is not endless.<\/p>\n

“We did require stuctural reform, we did require change, we were told we were going to get it and for that change we’ve put forward the monies on behalf of the people.<\/p>\n

“But that is not bottomless and it’s not endless, so I would hope and I would expect that RT\u00c9 live up to their side of the bargain in respect of the agreement that’s there with the Government.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"RT\u00c9 Director General Kevin Bakhurst has said that while some historic pension top-ups were approved at the time,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":232743,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[84,4176,4174,4175,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-232742","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-finance","10":"tag-personal-finance","11":"tag-personalfinance","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}