Mr. Noel Kelly:

I want to echo everything Mr. Tubridy has said. I am sorry we are here today as well. We asked to come and meet the committee because we have huge respect for it. We have not spoken to anybody else. We just wanted to get the opportunity to put our side across. I will try to be as brief as I possibly can if the Cathaoirleach will allow it.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to meet with it today. I hope this meeting will help to clarify the confusion which has arisen over the past few weeks. We appreciate the seriousness of all these issues. The controversy over the past two weeks has been damaging to RTÉ but it has also been hugely damaging to Ryan Tubridy, me and my business.

Earlier today, we circulated a pack which we believe contains the key documents that will help to understand this crisis. The document runs to 39 pages and it includes relevant excerpts from Mr. Tubridy's 2015 and 2020 contracts with RTÉ, extracts from the accounts of Mr. Tubridy’s company for the relevant years and various mails which track the back-and-forth negotiations for the 2020 RTÉ contract with Renault. We have made redactions where necessary, but we have been as transparent as possible to inform the committee with all the information at our disposal. I want to highlight a number of documents which go to the heart of the issues.

Let me start with the under-declaration of payments made to Mr. Tubridy when they were published. These are the figures for 2017, 2018, 2019 and January 2021. This issue has caused a lot of distress and it is entirely a mess of RTÉ’s own making. Mr. Tubridy’s contract from 2015 - pages 1 to 4 of the pack - clearly states the fees he received in each of the following five years. They are set out in clause 8.1 of the contract and were €495,000, €495,000, €545,000, €545,000 and €545,000 for the five years. Mr. Tubridy received those fees exactly, nothing more and nothing less. This is confirmed in the extracts from Mr. Tubridy's filed accounts company, Tuttle Productions, which we also include in the pack. We note that the accounts of Tuttle Productions run from January to December, whereas RTÉ's contract ran from September.

In January 2021, when RTÉ made its incorrect declarations, it knew what it had paid Mr. Tubridy. Indeed, the chief financial officer emailed us on 19 December 2019 - this is on page 5 in the pack. She set out the actual earnings for each of the relevant years correctly but just over a year later, in January 2021, RTÉ made false or incorrect declarations about the same figures. In some respects, this was an accident waiting to happen. We previously asked RTÉ to give us reasonable notice when it planned to publish figures. My email on 16 January 2020 - on page 6 of the pack - specifically requests this. If it had done that, we would have had time to check the figures and avoid errors. However, RTÉ ignored our request for reasons I still do not understand.

In March 2020, we saw the first sign that RTÉ, with all its accountants and auditors, might be struggling to understand the correct accounting treatment for what they paid Mr. Tubridy in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

That month RTÉ sent us a letter about an exit fee Mr. Tubridy was due as part of his 2015 contract. It was agreed that Mr. Tubridy was not going to raise an invoice for this and RTÉ wanted to agree how to explain it. However, in the draft sent to us, RTÉ proposed to change the payments it had made to Mr. Tubridy already, effectively lowering them by €120,000. The logic was that it could offset the €120,000 we had agreed not to ask for in 2020 against payments that had already made to Mr. Tubridy for 2017, 2018 and 2019. We argued against this and RTÉ accepted our points at the time. This is clear from the document at pages 14 to 16 of our pack. For some reason, however, it looks like the confused thinking returned and RTÉ published the wrong figures again in January 2021, effectively causing huge reputational damage to Mr. Tubridy in the process.

Another important point I should add is that just last month, on 23 June, RTÉ published new figures. It effectively restated figures for payments to Mr. Tubridy for 2017, 2018 and 2019 and added in declarations for figures paid to him in 2020 and 2021. Bizarrely, the figures RTÉ declared for both 2020 and 2021 are wrong. In both years, it overstated the amount it paid Mr. Tubridy. We address this issue on pages 28 and 29 of the pack. For 2020, RTÉ overstated earnings of €62,536 and for 2021, it overstated €83,381. Clearly, RTÉ is still struggling with these declarations.

I turn to the Renault contract which ran parallel to the 2020 contract Mr. Tubridy had with RTÉ. I refer members to page 5 of the pack. This is an email sent to NK Management on 19 December 2019 by RTÉ's then chief financial officer, CFO, Ms Breda O'Keeffe. This email sets out RTÉ’s starting position for negotiations on the 2020 contract. Members will see that this email is where the idea of a commercial sponsorship with a third party with an annual fee of €75,000 is first suggested. This comes from RTÉ. This did not strike us as unusual as Renault was a key sponsor for RTÉ, so it was understandable that it would wish to ensure all parties were aligned.

Next we come to RTÉ's decision to underwrite this Renault contract. This is perhaps the most shocking revelation of this morning. Since this controversy began, RTÉ has tried to distance itself from this decision. It has effectively blamed former director general Dee Forbes for doing a solo run and giving a verbal commitment to underwrite the contract on a Zoom call in May. RTÉ executives said there was a strong pushback against the idea of underwriting the agreement. That is incorrect. I refer members to page 10 of the pack. At the time, Ms O’Keeffe was the chief financial officer of RTÉ. On page 10, members will see an email she sent to my office. It is dated 20 February 2020. It is copied to another member of the executive board, the then director general and RTÉ’s solicitor. In this email Ms O’Keeffe responds in red to various points which had been discussed. She states at the top of the email that this is "our final position", because negotiations go back and forth, in respect of the new contract. In the last paragraph on this page, Ms O’Keeffe, on behalf of RTÉ, states explicitly "we can provide you with a side letter to underwrite this fee for the duration of the contract". There was no secret; there is no secret. To our surprise, Ms O’Keeffe told the committee last week that when she left RTÉ in March there was no support to provide that type of guarantee and no such guarantee was on offer. However, she had written to us making exactly that offer a month earlier. Last week, nobody from RTÉ here with Ms O’Keeffe challenged her when she said that. We were surprised too because on 30 June, four days before she appeared at the media committee, we wrote to RTÉ and highlighted the significance of Ms O’Keeffe’s email.

Ms O'Keeffe's email also casts a new light on the contribution of Adrian Lynch, deputy director general, to the committee. Mr. Lynch told the committee that agreement to underwrite the contract was given verbally on a Zoom call with NK Management on 7 May by the then director general. He described this as "the significant point at the centre of this". RTÉ has tried to portray the guarantee as a decision given late in the negotiations on a Zoom call by Dee Forbes without the awareness of the executive board.

Clearly, that is not correct. The decision was taken early by RTÉ and was known widely within the executive board of RTÉ.

Let me move now to the invoicing arrangements for the Renault contract. Our document pack shows that RTÉ did not just suggest the idea of a contract with Renault; it oversaw every development and implementation of same. We were happy with that. We knew Renault was a major sponsor for RTÉ so RTÉ would be committed to keeping it happy. We knew the contract with Renault was a separate contract from Mr. Tubridy’s independent contractor services contract with RTÉ for radio and TV work. We understood that Mr. Tubridy would have to do extra work for Renault but that was no different from the other work he would do for the BBC or for his publishers etc. This was just a separate commercial agreement. Mr. Tubridy was agreeing to a substantial pay cut from RTÉ and he was entitled to seek other work outside RTÉ. There was nothing secret about this - far from it. The contract required Mr. Tubridy to do public appearances for Renault for which it could seek and expect attention, as indeed it did.

With the terms agreed, RTÉ instructed us on how to invoice for this work. For the first invoice, it instructed us to raise an invoice directly with Renault. It gave us names and details and set out the proposed narrative for the invoice. The committee can see the instructions RTÉ gave us for this in an email on 24 July 2020 on page 23 in our document pack and on page 24 it can see the invoice we did indeed send to Renault. When it came to the second and third invoices, RTÉ gave us new instructions. I refer the committee to page 25 of the pack, showing an email from RTÉ’s then commercial director, Ms Geraldine O’Leary, dated 29 April 2022. This invoice passes on instructions for how invoices two and three should be raised. That email instructed us on the company name to be put on the invoice, namely, Astus; the address to be put on the invoice; and the VAT reference to be included on the invoice. The email instructed us not to put any person’s name on it. This email also gave us a general assurance from a colleague of Ms O’Leary’s that "if he [meaning NK Management] sends it back to me I will then sort everything else out."

The committee should know that while the invoices were made out to Astus, we were directed to email them to RTÉ and it would do what was necessary to process them with Astus. I should stress that at this time we in NK Management had no idea who Astus was. We had no reason to think Astus was linked to RTÉ or that it was acting on behalf of RTÉ. We had no idea it might be making payments to us on behalf of RTÉ or that the payments were linked to RTÉ underwriting the Renault contract. RTÉ never said that to us. Astus never said that to us. Renault never said that to us. We simply followed the instructions we were given as we had with the first invoice. The committee will see a copy of the two invoices we raised in the name of Astus, sent by email from us to RTÉ, in the pack on pages 26 and 27.

People have asked why we went along with those instructions and why we did not set out more detail about what the invoices related to. At the time we had no reason to suspect RTÉ might be trying to hide payments to Mr. Tubridy. I am still shocked that was its intention. We trusted RTÉ. It is not some unknown start-up, with opaque funding, a chequered past or a record for dodgy financial dealings. It is a national institution that is almost 100 years old. It is a massive business turning over €350 million a year. It has internal and external auditors. It has a heavyweight board and teams of financial advisers and accountants. As Mr. Bakhurst said yesterday, RTÉ has robust processes and rigorous oversight of finances in many parts of the organisation. That is what we assumed too. Why would we suspect it was hiding information about one of its key contracts? Why would it even do that?

We are nearing the end. I am sorry but this is important. I want to address one other thing. There has been a lot of coverage of a side letter with the 2020 contract in which the RTÉ director general says the agreed earnings in the contract will not be reduced during the term of the contract. As any lawyer will confirm, this letter had no practical impact. The contract itself guarantees the earnings; that is what a contract does. We were simply trying to impress on RTÉ that Mr. Tubridy had just signed up to new cuts in his 2020 contract of €525,000 and had also never taken the payment of €120,000 so RTÉ should not even think about coming back for more cuts given the size of those cuts.

To conclude, for the past number of years Mr. Tubridy has continued to perform at the highest level, working with millions of colleagues and leading shows which brought in, over a six-year period, €100 million in revenue to RTÉ. He raised tens of millions for charities through the toy show appeals and various others.

We have heard a lot about RTÉ's public service ethos but let us call a spade a spade. RTÉ is a hybrid organisation. Its commercial activities are key to keeping the station afloat, maintaining jobs and creating content. Ryan Tubridy has been a huge driver for RTÉ's most successful commercial activities over the past 14 years.

Ryan and I, and our families and friends, have attracted a horrendous amount of criticism and abuse in the past few weeks, which I would not wish on anybody, and why? Because the only figure in this whole story whose face was recognisable was Ryan Tubridy's. He has been made a poster boy for this scandal and that is undeserved. This is not the Ryan Tubridy scandal; this is the RTÉ scandal.