Ryan Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly will come out fighting at today’s Oireachtas committee meetings, blaming RTÉ for misreporting his earnings and contradicting key elements of RTÉ’s account of the affair.
In strongly-worded opening statements, which have been circulated to committee members this morning, Mr Kelly and Mr Tubridy say they have been unfairly vilified in recent weeks, and deeply damaged, as a result of RTÉ’s actions and subsequent accounts of those actions.
Mr Tubridy also says he wants to be back on air – but he has substantial grievances with his employer.
Mr Tubridy says that he has come to the committee to “call out some untruths” and goes on to list “seven material untruths”. He says that there are “no overpayments” but that RTÉ is guilty of “underdeclarations”.
He denies he was aware that RTÉ was overstating his earnings and says that he never tried to conceal anything, though he says that he should have asked about RTÉ’s incorrect declarations of his earnings.
“I signed a contract in good faith,” Mr Tubridy says. “I declared my earnings and paid my taxes. My employer has acknowledged that it has engaged in deceptive practices to pay me – practices that were hidden from me.
“The result? I become the face of a national scandal; accused of being complicit, deceitful and dishonest. I think that statement of June 22nd was very unhelpful in this regard. The full TRUTH was concealed.”
“This has been my darkest hour both professionally and personally. I know the same is true for my agent and friend, Noel Kelly and his family.”
Mr Tubridy concludes by saying he is hopeful that he will “soon get back on air to do the job I love”.
Crucially, both Mr Tubridy and Mr Kelly deny that the RTÉ executive board was not aware that the former director general Dee Forbes had agreed to underwrite Mr Tubridy’s €75,000 a year earnings from Renault.
This is a direct contradiction of accounts given to the Oireachtas by Breda O’Keeffe, the former chief financial officer of RTÉ, who told the Media Committee last week that there was no support in RTÉ to provide the guarantee.
“RTE has tried to portray the guarantee as a decision given late in negotiations on a Zoom call by Dee Forbes without the awareness on the part 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,” Mr Kelly says.
Mr Kelly also says that RTÉ “did not just suggest the idea of a contract with Renault, they oversaw its development and implementation.”
He says that his company was instructed by RTÉ how to invoice for that contract, which were subsequently sent to a London media firm which arranged for the payments to be made through the RTÉ barter account.
“I should stress that at this time we in NK Management had no idea who Astus [the London company] 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 that they might be making the payments to us on behalf of RTÉ or that the payments were linked to RTÉ underwriting the Renault contract,” he says.
However, he does not say what he or his company believed the invoices were for.
“People have asked why we went along with those instructions and why we didn’t set out more detail about what the invoice related to. But at the time we had no reason to suspect that RTÉ might be trying to hide payments to Ryan. I am still shocked that was their intention. We trusted RTÉ. It’s not some unknown start-up, with opaque funding, a chequered past or a record for dodgy financial dealings,” he says.
The statements are accompanied by an extensive dossier of documents, including emails during the contract negotiations between Kelly’s firm and RTÉ.
These will be pored over by committee members over the coming hours. However, it is clear that the battle lines between RTÉ and Tubridy/Kelly are now stark. RTÉ’s biggest star and his agent are squarely blaming RTE for unfairly causing them untold commercial and reputational damage. He wants back on air. A reconciliation looks a long way off. But if it is not reached, the dispute may well end up in the courts.
