Mr. Thompson, who left the BBC in 2012 and is now the president and chief executive officer of The New York Times Co., has challenged July testimony by Mr. Patten about how much the trust was told about a series of large severance payments to executives who left the corporation in an effort to reduce costs.
While the details of the dispute are complicated and arcane, and personalities aside, the questions of how the BBC uses its money and whether its executives get sufficient oversight from the trust are the real meat of the issue.
In recent submissions to Parliament, Mr. Thompson has accused the trust, which represents the interests of ordinary Britons who pay a television tax that goes to the BBC, of misleading the committee and the National Audit Office. In July, Mr. Patten had expressed surprise at the details of key severance payments, which were larger than contractually mandated, according to the auditors, while Mr. Thompson insists that the trust was fully informed and raised no objections. In particular, Mr. Thompson’s deputy, Mark Byford, was given a full year’s salary in lieu of notice despite having worked another eight months when the deputy’s job was eliminated.
One of the documents Mr. Thompson has presented is a briefing memo prepared for Mr. Patten explaining the payments, which were approved before Mr. Patten became chairman of the trust. He said that Mr. Patten’s testimony in July was “fundamentally misleading about the extent of trust knowledge and involvement.”
In a statement, the trust called Mr. Thompson’s submission “a bizarre document,” saying “we completely disagree with Mark Thompson’s analysis” and that Mr. Patten and trustee Anthony Fry had not misled Parliament. Mr. Patten, it said, had not had “a full and formal briefing on the exact terms of Mark Byford’s departure.”
Mr. Patten has come under considerable criticism for the large severance payment given to Mr. Thompson’s successor, George Entwistle, who lasted only 54 days in the job before resigning last November over a reporting scandal but was given a full year’s salary in addition to a severance payment, totaling some 475,000 pounds. The furor over that payment has made the earlier payments more politically sensitive.
The auditors found that of 150 senior executives who left in the three years ending December 2012, which cost the corporation 25 million pounds, the BBC paid more salary in lieu of notice than contractually mandated in 22 cases, for an extra cost of 1.4 million pounds. In addition, the auditors said, the BBC agreed to other discretionary payments, including car services and fees, to 22 managers at a cost of another 510,000 pounds, which the corporation said were the result of negotiations with those who were being laid off.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/world/europe/bbc-severance-dispute-goes-to-parliamentary-panel.html?partner=rss&emc=rss