Dee Forbes banging the RTE TV licence drum again 60m uncollected fee *poll not working - pl ignore*

Look at the bigger picture. People from the print media often appear on TV or radio panels. If a newspaper had adopted a highly adversarial position on RTE then a lot of that work would have dried up. One newspaper had its journalists effectively banned some Communicorp panels back in the day.

Tubridy is fair game now. While he was on an extraordiary salary, the payoffs for these RTE management people are obscene. As for Cusack, she seems like the next expendable RTE management type.

Regards...jmcc

I agree completely with this. TSTM was undoubtedly flawed but at least they were trying something, however badly they implemented it. Remember 'I, keano'? You gotta think that was a very flaky idea but it was (IIRC) a huge success.

On the RT think, agree completely. I remember when it first broke, Mick Clifford, I think, asking 'Why?', why would you do this? I've never understood the thinking of Dee Forbes and others in risking so much for so little. Maybe they were in awe of RT? Or maybe something a lot grubbier and darker.

No problem with them taking a punt but it seems that they took the punt with no planning in place. Maybe it might have worked with a bit more preparation. In my opinion it looks like there was rush by Senior Execs to get it out there and cash in on it.

I would'nt describe him a scapegoat, plenty of blame going around for this and he and his management team were foolish in thinking people would buy their excuses for collecting money not earned. He though he could blag his way out of this and it backfired on a grand scale.

Turbidy still holding on to the 150k for work never done, despite stating it would be repaid.

If Noel Kelly wasn’t so insistent on getting Ryan this money, we would never heard about any of this and Tubbs would be finished his days work already and probably planning a cinema visit in the afternoon.

Greed brought this into the light

Excellent post…

Questions should be asked about whether the top 10 salary/fee presenters in the organisation have exit packages in place when their contracts end and if so why.

I don't think KB is any different to anyone else there - he has been there before and knew well the craic that was going on. Remember - he wasn't "brought in" to "clean the place up" - his employment starting was a done deal long before the issues with Tubridy contracts and all of this came to public light.

On the issue of employment contracts - I'd love to know where these types of contract are in place in the private sector, never mind the state funded public sector. While these are all high level execs one would think that these types of contract and exit payments are not standard. There's also grounds in a lot of cases for voiding these contracts based on some of the actions undertaken.

Again, the line we have been spun is that "I've been told there are no laws broken here, so we have not referred to the OCF or the Garda Fraud squad" is simply ludricous. Those organisations tell you whether there is enough evidence available (after reviewing same) whether the potential for a law having been broke has taken place - and prosecute accordingly.

I don't like executive types tell me that "no law has been broken here" - particularily when many of the people who are supposed to answer questions don't turn up to answer questions.

To me it shows the PAC is tootless, and the OCF and Garda Fraud squad may as well be as well.

The sums of money being taked about are massive and totally out of kilter with any level of performance based salaries or contractually obliged terms and conditions in play anywhere else.

And as for the NDA's that have been signed around exit fees? Disgraceful. There's absolutely no reason there should be NDA's around these.

Never mind the sh1tshow that was the TSTM - the decision making here was shocking, yet you have people being paid to leave the organisation because of it?

I used to work in a large multinational and those contracts do exist.

The norm was 6 weeks redundancy for every year worked with a cap of two years salary. Every employee there for a few years, knew that after 17 years, the redundancy pot stopped growing. In my time there, I saw a lot of people celebrating being let go, which years later I can understand but still find a bit odd.

The “6 weeks per year” was not unique to us as I have heard people in other business’ refer to it also. Large organisations don’t develop these benefits in isolation, they got the idea from elsewhere.

Re the fraud and laws broken…….you are in the wrong country to expect investigations into wrong doing actually leading to a confirmation of wrongdoing.

We allow people out of prison without purging their contempt of court and no one was convicted for the banking collapse. We convicted people for mis representing financial statements, so the banking collapse must have happened without human intervention. Regency trial had similar outcome.

We as a country don’t do justice, we talk about it, then forget about it.

I was hoping that we would have finished with the first stage of this fiasco : the revelation stage.

After 8 months, we are still finding things out piecemeal and the TD’s are gorging themselves on this publicity. When this first stage finally ends, the Politicans will then have to outline the future of RTE, its role, funding model, salary disclosures etc. Maybe that’s why the want to drag the revelation stage out until the next GE.

I have worked in many US multinationals (and still do) and they are not written into the contract. They might be practice, but they are not legal obligations. Anyway why would a partially publicly-funded body like RTE be legally or contractually obligated to pay such large exit packages? It makes no sense. Coveny's exit, if it was under Redundancy should have been statutory 2 weeks, given what has been exposed in the past 8 months. If KB allowed him to be made redundant on 6+ weeks per year of service using public funds, he is continuing the cycle of extravagance that has landed RTE in massive overspending in the first place. I do not believe any of them have a guaranteed exit package written in to their contracts.

Kb: "the problem here lads is your salary/exit payments are publicly available, you need to include bullet proof nda's in your package "

Kevin's first major impact on rte

Coveney's role was not being replaced, it is/was rolled into someone else's role. So if they were looking to get him out and he was not agreeing to leave voluntarily, a simple redundancy at statutory pay would have done the job. There was no need to buy him out of a contract. Anyway, the official reporting in the independent was that Coveney resigned. And if he did, then why was any payment needed whether redundancy or otherwise. The whole thing stinks and I am really surprised that KB has put himself in this position.

Maybe this whole sorry episode will put paid to the whole "things would be so much better if they were run by women" thing. Seems to me Forbes, Doherty and O'Keefe and themselves a little girl's club going.

Upshot: Women are just as **** as Men.

Was kinda my point