RTÉ says Dee Forbes signed off on payments to Ryan Tubridy

Dee Forbes (L) resigned with immediate effect from RTÉ on Monday. She is pictured here with Ryan Tubridy who, according to Grant Thornton, did no wrong in relation to the current payments controversy. File Picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin

RTÉ has said a series of controversial payments to Ryan Tubridy from 2020 would have been given final approval by Director General Dee Forbes.

Its interim director general Adrian Lynch also pointed out that no member of RTÉ’s executive other than Ms Forbes “had all the necessary information in order to understand that the publicly declared figures for Ryan Tubridy could have been wrong”.

He said that the series of €75,000 payments, to be made by commercial partner Renault but underwritten by RTÉ, were negotiated by “the director general and the then chief financial officer (Breda O’Keeffe) supported by the RTÉ solicitor” and were then approved by Ms Forbes.

Dee Forbes resigned with immediate effect from RTÉ on Monday, having last week been suspended from her role, which she had been due to leave at the start of July. File photo: Niall Carson/PA

The RTÉ statement asserts that of the RTÉ executive board’s members only Ms Forbes and RTÉ commercial director Geraldine O’Leary had knowledge of two invoices for €75,000 apiece delivered to the broadcaster in May and July of 2022, and that Ms O’Leary’s involvement was limited to “instructions” given to her by Ms Forbes regarding those payments.

It adds that Mr Tubridy had not been made aware that RTÉ delivered a credit note to Renault as part of the deal’s transactions, and likewise that the Grant Thornton investigation commissioned into the payments had made “no finding of wrongdoing” on the part of either Renault or Mr Tubridy.

Ms Forbes resigned with immediate effect from RTÉ on Monday, having been suspended from her role, which she had been due to leave at the start of July, last week.

In doing so, she stated that the RTÉ board had not treated her “with anything approaching the levels of fairness, equity and respect that anyone should expect as an employee, a colleague or a person”.

In his much-anticipated statement, which was accompanied by a redacted version of the Grant Thornton report, Mr Lynch noted that Ms Forbes had “not had the opportunity to respond to the details set out below and may therefore challenge or disagree with our understanding and position”.

He said that no former employees had been asked to contribute to the statement.

He said: 

Final approval of fees to be paid to RTÉ’s top 10 most highly paid on-air presenters is by the Director General.

He also said that no former employees had been asked to contribute to the statement.

Mr Lynch, while apologising “unreservedly” once more for the scandal which has rocked the broadcaster, noted however that legal advice given to RTÉ had concluded that there had been “no illegality” concerning the payments to Mr Tubridy, and that they had been made “pursuant to an agreed contract”.

He said that it is “important to note” that RTÉ had not restated its annual accounts on foot of the crisis and “does not need to restate” as all the payments in question, totalling €345,000 in excess of Mr Tubridy’s publicly-disclosed salary between 2017 and 2023, had been “reconciled in RTÉ’s published accounts”.

Former Late Late Show host Ryan Tubridy.

Regarding the negotiations for Mr Tubridy’s new contract held in late 2019, Mr Lynch’s statement said that in December of that year Ms Forbes had met with Mr Tubridy’s agent Noel Kelly. Following this, Ms O’Keeffe had proposed that in agreeing a new contract, Mr Tubridy would “offset” the exit payment agreed in his previous contract, and have his RTÉ wage reduced by 15% in line with Government expectations, with the further facilitation of “a possible additional commercial agreement” worth €75,000 per year.

Ms O’Keeffe left her position as CFO in January 2020.

Mr Tubridy’s new contract thus effectively consisted of two separate arrangements, one between Mr Tubridy and RTÉ, and the other between the presenter, Renault, and RTÉ.

The statement from Mr Lynch notes that, after the commercial deal with Renault foundered, Mr Kelly sent a number of communications between January and March of 2022 “chasing payment on foot of the underwriting of the commercial agreement”.

Ms Forbes, in her resignation statement, had previously stated that the commercial arrangement had been scuppered by the covid-19 pandemic, leaving RTÉ liable for two of the €75,000 payments to Mr Tubridy for 2021 and 2022.

Mr Lynch further noted that RTÉ had incurred the costs of hosting the commercial sponsor events in 2022, at a further cost of €30,586.