Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said he cannot rule out the possibility that some payments made by RTÉ may have been on the wrong side of the law.
Mr Varadkar said he did not think it had yet reached the point where An Garda Síochána needed to be involved, but he did raise concerns over whether payments made by the national broadcaster were compliant with company law.
Ireland’s public service broadcaster has been engulfed in crisis amid revelations about its internal financial, accounting and governance practices.
Many of the issues emerged when senior RTÉ executives were questioned at two parliamentary committees in Dublin this week.
Much of the focus has centred on the workings of a UK-based “barter” account used by RTÉ to pay for certain services and tickets and trips related to corporate entertaining.
Arriving for a European Council summit meeting in Brussels on Friday, the Taoiseach was asked by reporters whether any of the disclosures to date merited the involvement of gardaí.
“I’m not sure we’re at that point,” he said.
“But it did concern me to hear that payments, it would appear anyway, that payments were made by RTÉ to outside contractors for work that wasn’t actually done.
“And that does raise issues in terms of accounting rules and company law, but I think we’re not yet at the point (of Garda involvement).
“I don’t think we can rule out the fact that it’s not just a case of irregular payments, that some of these payments may have been on the wrong side of the law. But don’t want to jump to that conclusion.”
At a meeting of the Public Accounts Committee in the Oireachtas parliament on Thursday it was revealed that RTÉ paid out hundreds of thousands of euro to pay for tickets and trips to events like the Rugby World Cup in Japan, Ireland rugby matches in Dublin and the 2019 Champions League Final in Madrid.
Mr Varadkar said it was not unusual for large organisations like RTÉ to entertain its clients.
The Taoiseach said his concern was around apparent “concealed” payments that have been uncovered.
“I don’t think it’s unusual that any company or any large body would seek to entertain its clients, that’s part of the way business works,” he said.
“The fact that it was so untransparent, even concealed, that payments were made for work that perhaps wasn’t done, that’s much more serious I think and is a matter of real concern.”
RTÉ operates on a dual funding model, with 55 per cent of its income, €200 million a year, brought in by way of the licence fee.
The rest is generated through commercial revenues.
Mr Varadkar said RTÉ may have to change the way it manages its accounts, potentially separating out its public and private sector funding streams.
“I think going forward there is going to be an issue about how RTÉ manages its accounts,” he told reporters in Brussels.
“It receives public money from the licence fee and other sources and receives commercial money from advertising and commercial partners and it all goes into the one pot and I’m not sure that’s going to be appropriate going forward.
“You know, as somebody who’s a trustee of a political party, we have to keep the public money separate from the money we raise ourselves, we have to produce separate accounts.
“And I’m just kind of wondering might it have been better if RTÉ operated on that basis.
“But, like I say, this issue is still evolving.”
Mr Varadkar said using powers under the Broadcasting Act to appoint a designated person to go into RTÉ to establish what had gone wrong had not been ruled out.
The Government has already ordered an external review and is finalising its terms of reference.
One option would be to use the Act to appoint someone to go into RTÉ to secure all the relevant information and address the issues.
Mr Varadkar said initially the Government was not planning to take this approach, but he stressed that media minister Catherine Martin was still reserving her judgment on that as a possible option.
“We haven’t decided exactly which legal mechanism will be used,” he said.
“So there is an option under the Act for the minister to appoint a designated person and at least earlier in the week it wasn’t planned to do that, but the Minister is still reserving judgment on that and it remains an option but the important thing really is less the mechanism that we use, it’s more the fact that it’s done and that somebody from the outside who understands corporate governance, understands accounting and understands how organisations should be run, and should not be run, is brought in to carry out an assessment, to do a report for government and to put things right.”
