BBC exes gravy train revealed:

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BBC exes gravy train revealed: Bosses charged £100 bottles of bubbly, private planes and £500 handbags - all to the licence fee payer
By Nicola Boden
Last updated at 7:04 PM on 25th June 2009
Click here for the BBC expense details in full

• Dozens earn more than the Prime Minister
  
• Thompson family flew home for £2,200 after Sachsgate
  
• Ross given £100 flowers at time of £18m contract deal
  
• Jana Bennett claimed £500 for stolen handbag
  
• Executive's dinner at five-star Vegas hotel costs £1,430
  

The lavish culture at the top of the BBC was laid bare today as the huge salaries of its most senior executives and astonishing expense claims were revealed.

Bosses at the corporation spent a fortune on private Cessna plane trips, five-star hotel rooms and even a £400 cake.
They also splurged thousands on the broadcaster's biggest stars, lavishing them with expensive bouquets of flowers and bottles of vintage champagne.
Jonathan Ross was given a £100 bouquet of flowers one month before his £18million contract was unveiled and £1,137 was spent celebrating Terry Wogan's knighthood.

Last year, the BBC paid £2,200 for flights for Director General Mark Thompson's family after he was forced to cut short a holiday because of the 'Sachsgate' row.
Executives salaries, revealed for the first time today, show dozens of executives at the broadcaster earn far more than the Prime Minister's salary of £189,994.

Most of the 50 highest earners are on at least £200,000 and those on the executive board receive between £310,000 and £647,000 not including their bonuses.

The BBC released the claims for its top 100 executives and key decision-makers for the past five years to counter accusations it had wasted millions in public funds.

But the details will do little to dispel the criticism. They include claims for everything from a £1,430 dinner for 29 in Las Vegas to a £14.99 book on the history of QPR.
Risking a new cover-up row, the identity of stars showered with gifts are largely omitted and their pay packets are also being kept secret.
In just one example, BBC Director of Vision Jana Bennett spent more than £2,000 on a 'talent dinner' in May 2007 but there were no names of the stars involved.
Miss Bennett, who is paid £406,000 a year, also spent £464.97 on flowers to congratulate celebrities in 2007/8 but again their identities are not revealed.

In a rare disclosure by name, the executive charged £100 for flowers given to Jonathan Ross back in May 2006 just when they were agreeing his £18million contract.
She lodged a claim for another £100 set of flowers bought the day before Ross' new deal was announced, but this time the recipient's name is not given.
Miss Bennett also spent £231.55 on dinner with Jeremy Paxman in July 2004 where they were discussing his job.

And she splurged £1,275.30 on flowers and champagne over eight months in 2004.
The BBC explained they were 'talent gifts' which it allows to mark a successful series, particular achievement or occasion such as when a staff member has a baby.

It decided in October 2008 that it was 'no longer appropriate' to buy champagne because of the economic climate, a note on the claim form declares.

Mr Thompson, who earns £647,000 a year as Director General, recouped £2,236.90 for flights for his family during the 'Sachsgate' furore last year.
He had been enjoying a half-term holiday in Sicily when the scandal started and was not initially going to come home but eventually it was decided he must.

'The Chairman of the Audit Committee of the Executive Board agreed that the expense of cutting a family holiday short would be met by the BBC in advance of the claim being made. The Chairman of the BBC Trust was also informed,' the form said.
Another £1,277.71 was spent on a private plane when Mr Thompson was on holiday in the U.S. in 2004 so that he could come home to deal with 'an urgent staff issue'.
He chartered a Cessna from Maine to Boston after he was summoned, reportedly because of an internal investigation into Alan Yentob's expenses. Mr Yentob was later cleared of any wrongdoing.

Other revelations from today's files include:
Mark Thompson charged £99 for a bottle of Krug Grande Cuvee champagne, given to Bruce Forsyth to mark his 80th birthday;
Jana Bennett claimed £500 for a handbag stolen 'while on official business' but was only given half. She also spent more than £1,200 for a five-night stay in LA, £400 on a cake to celebrate the end of Any Dream Will Do and £1,507 on a party to send off Jay Hunt. Months later, Miss Hunt returned as BBC1's new controller.

Chief operating office Caroline Thompson charged £220 for a leaving party at her house in September 2007. A note said 'cheaper than restaurant';
Then Future Media and Technology Chief Ashley Highfield charged £1,430 for a meal for 29 at the five-star Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. He also recouped £133 for a day's parking and £217 for an iPod touch to test the BBC's video services;
His replacement Erik Huggers claimed more than £2,500 for a three-day trip to Las Vegas in January which included a stay at the Bellagio. A month later, he went on a £469 trip to Barcelona.
Deputy Director General Mark Byford bought a £14.99 history book on Queen's Park Rangers. He also spent £37.90 on a 'welcome back lunch' for reporter Alan Johnston after his hostage ordeal and another £160 on theatre tickets to recognise 'extraordinary commitment' to Mr Johnston in that time.
Celebrations: Jana Bennett spent £400 on a cake for the after party for BBC talent show Any Dream Will Do, which was won by Lee Mead (above)
The BBC has repeatedly used freedom of information exemptions to block inquiries about staff pay and expenses, refusing even to tell the National Audit Office how much its radio presenters were paid.

But now, in an effort to show greater transparency, the Corporation has decided to reveal individual expenses in more detail than previously.

Its top ten executives claimed £145,000 on expenses last year, but an itemised account of what the money was spent on has never been released before.
Today's files were released as spreadsheets for each executive and did not include receipts, unlike the heavily-censored MPs' expenses released last week.

Last month Prime Minister Gordon Brown said all institutions that received public money needed to be open, transparent and accountable.

Mr Thompson said the BBC will, in future, publish a breakdown of pay by name for all executive directors, the top 50 earners in management and the top decision-makers.
This new system will cover around 100 people beyond the actual executive board. 'There will be full disclosure of renumeration by name,' he insisted.
Eventually, these people's expenses will be published in full line-by-line every quarter, including anything spent on hospitality and the gift register.
'We believe that this package of disclosure represent a very significant advance in openness at the BBC and will place the BBC where it should be, which is at the frontier of disclosure practice in the public sector,' he said.
'It is what the public want - indeed what they demand - but I believe that in the end it helps rather than hinders the task of building a BBC which really respond to them and inspires them with great programmes and services.'
The executive claimed the risk stars would go and work elsewhere justified the exclusion of their expense claims from the new system.

'It has been our view that it does not make sense for the BBC to disclose individual talent fees,' Mr Thompson said.

'Why? We operate in an industry where confidentiality is the norm in which only one of our competitors is themselves subject to freedom of information.

'There's a real danger that talent would migrate to broadcasters where confidential information about how much they are paid will not be disclosed,' he said.
He pledged to disclose how much is spent on talent as a whole and to work on a plan to make this spending more transparent to allow for some level of public scrutiny.

The Director General yesterday said top talent costs 'perhaps 2 per cent' of the licence fee, which would amount to £72million a year.
This includes around £6million a year for Ross, who is the broadcaster's highest-paid entertainer and is on a three-year deal worth £18million.

MARK THOMPSON: A private plane and one Brucie bonus
Director General - Salary £647,000

Mark Thompson's claims include flights for his family back from Sicily at a cost to the licence payer of £2,236.90.
He also charged £500 for hotel rooms during the trip to Sicily last autumn and another £206 in costs for being forced to cut his holiday short.
Other claims include a £1,277.71 private plane flight during another holiday to the U.S. in August 2004 so that he could come back and deal with an 'urgent staff issue'.

He also spent:

£99.99 on a bottle of vintage champagne for Bruce Forsyth's birthday;
£500 on a Christmas party for executives in 2007;
£73.69 on a business lunch with Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell.
£1,800 on a business trip to New Delhi.
His total expenses for 2008/9, came to just over £19,000. For the whole five years, they were £77,823.35.

JANA BENNETT: Leaving parties, cakes and flowers
Director of BBC Vision Salary - £406,000

Jana Bennett splurged thousands of pounds on presents for staff, including a £100 bouquet of flowers for Jonathan Ross in May 2006.
She claimed back £231.55 in July 2004 to cover dinner to 'discuss Jeremy Paxman's contract', £27 for lunch with David Dimbleby and £47 for lunch with Andrew Marr.

She also spent £400 on a cake to mark the end of the Any Dream Will Do series and £1,917.09 for Alison Sharman's leaving do in January 2006 at private members' club Soho House.
A £28 claim was lodged under 'coiffure services for Vision Talent Party' and two away days at the Frankie Bar and Grill cost £1,041.
She claimed £500 for a handbag stolen 'while on official business', filed as an insurance claim.

The BBC added a note to the form today, saying: 'The BBC decided to pay half the cost of replacing the property and cash stolen.'
On a trip to meet studio chiefs in Los Angeles in 2007, she claimed more than £1,300 to stay at the luxurious Raffles L'Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills.

Hotel bills for the World Economic Forum in Davos last January cost more than £1,100.

Other claims in 2005/6 included £85.25 on engraved Tiffany cufflinks as a 'talent gift' and £47 on a gift-wrapped Harrods teddy bear.
In 2007/8, a 'talent dinner' for 22 people in May 2007 set the broadcaster back a massive £2,070.
She billed £1,500 for a leaving party for BBC daytime controller Jay Hunt who left to join Channel 5 but returned less than a year later to be BBC1 controller.

ASHLEY HIGHFIELD: The iPod executiveEx-director of future media and technology (in 2007) - Salary £359,000

The then director future media and technology, Ashley Highfield, bought not one but two iPods and charged them on expenses.
Mr Highfield, who has since moved on to a job at Microsoft, bought an iPod in October 2005 for £238 to test the BBC's video services.
He then bought an iPod Touch for £217 in September 2007, again to test the corporation's video service.
Mr Highfield, 44, was in charge of the iPlayer and after it was successfully launched in August 2007, he claimed £237.37 for a 'thank you'.
In 2006-7, he went to Las Vegas twice, to Los Angeles three times and to San Francisco, Seattle and Cannes once each.
He charged £1,430 for a meal for 29 at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. The claim was filed under 'subsistence group meal after 11 hours duty'.

Mr Highfield also recouped £133 for one day's parking and spent more than £450 on 'external hospitality' during the Edinburgh festival.

JENNIFER ABRAMSKY: A £1,137 toast to Sir Terry Wogan
Ex-director of audio and music - Salary £316,000

Dame Jennifer Abramsky claimed thousands for leaving parties and dinners to celebrate with staff.
She spent a massive £1,137.55 on a dinner to mark Sir Terry Wogan being made a knight in September 2005.
Another £1,406.41 was spent on a send-off meal for Sir Nicholas Kenyon, who used to run the BBC Proms.
Dame Jennifer, 62, also spent £992.53 on a business meeting with unidentified guests to discuss the Charter Review and £550 on in December 2007 for an internal Christmas lunch.

At the other end of the scale, she spent £5.96 on wrapping paper, £20 for a picture frame and £29.99 for a plant.

The executive retired last June after 39 years at the corporation. She was made a CBE in 2000 and a DBE in this year's New Years Honours for services to broadcasting.

[Teddy Bear]

The flak continues to fall over the BBC largesse with public funds, and the second article below goes into the mindset that this extravagance represents.

Frankly Mark Thompson's claim for flight expenses for his family when he had to cut short their vacation because of the Brand/Ross debacle should be borne out of his own inflated £600+k salary. He is ultimately responsible for the stars hired and what they get up to. It's insult to injury.

BBC lifts lid on expenses, but stars’ pay stays secret
Dan Sabbagh, David Brown and Fiona Hamilton
BBC bosses spent £363,000 claimed from expense accounts over the past five years, with money from licence-fee payers being used for a £1,277 private jet trip for its director-general and a £99.99 bottle of vintage champagne given to Bruce Forsyth on his 80th birthday.

Mark Thompson, the director general, and the BBC’s other top ten executives spent more than £4,278 on flowers and champagne to reward highly paid stars; £54,971 on hotels in places ranging from Beverly Hills to Cannes; and £2,412 on taxis, which they claimed back from the public broadcaster.

The BBC also revealed that 47 of its employees were paid more than £200,000, with little-known executives such as Sharon Baylay, the director of marketing, paid between £310,000 and £340,000, compared with the £250,000 to £280,000 paid to the prominent controller of BBC One, Jay Hunt.

Forced to publish details after a string of Freedom of Information Act inquiries by journalists, Mr Thompson said that the public had a “right to know” what BBC executives spent, prompting another uncomfortable day for the Corporation, after scandals about TV fakery and on-air bullying by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross.

A Cessna light aircraft was used to help to fly Mr Thompson back from a family holiday in New England for a single day to attend an emergency meeting in London in 2004. Ironically, the purpose of the meeting was to discuss how to handle an internal investigation over allegations about expenses claims made by the creative director, Alan Yentob.

The BBC also paid £2,236 to fly Mr Thompson’s wife and two children back from Sicily last October, after he was forced to cut short another family holiday to deal with the Brand and Ross affair. He cited concerns about his family’s safety in the Italian countryside.

However, although the published figures contained few redactions of the kind seen on MPs’ expenses, large areas of information remained undisclosed. None of the expenses incurred by BBC executives using the Corporation’s central booking system were revealed yesterday — and, as expected, the BBC continues to refuse to publish how much stars earn or take as expenses.

Ross, who is reported to earn £6 million a year from the BBC, claimed yesterday that he would be willing to remain with the Corporation for less pay. “I will happily stay at the BBC for less money,” he wrote on his Twitter site. “I turned down a fortune to stay last time, believe it or don’t, and the flak is . . . unfortunate,” he added.

With the row over MPs’ expenses fresh in the public mind, the timing of the publication was difficult for the BBC. The Corporation escaped intense criticism from politicans mindful of the furore that surrounded their own expense claims.

Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative Culture spokesman, whose party wants the BBC to publish the exact pay of Ross and John Humphrys, complained that the disclosures did not go far enough. “It’s not just the top ten or top 100 people who should disclose their expenses — all the BBC employees are part of a public organisation. What we did at Westminster shows what happens when you don’t disclose expenses — you lose public trust.”

Don Foster, the Liberal Democrat Culture, Media and Sport spokesman, said: “The veil must be lifted even farther so that the public can judge whether they are getting good value for money. As the MPs’ expenses scandal has shown, transparency is the best driver of high standards.”

Mr Thompson promised further disclosure, including detailed expenses claims and receipts submitted by the top 100 staff. He also made a concession on stars’ pay, promising that the BBC would publish “the total amount we spend on talent”, estimated by him previously at £72 million a year.

Defending the £6 million pay package to Ross and other stars, Mr Thompson said that “disclosure of this kind is likely to lead, not to better value for money” but “fresh upward pressure on pay”, saying that Graham Norton or Anne Robinson or others could not be described as “public decision-makers or public officers of the BBC”.

Nevertheless, the BBC expenses files offered a window into how stars are treated, with repeated gifts of £49 bouquets of flowers and champagne at as much as £100 a bottle — although the latter was banned in October 2008. Terry Wogan, the Radio 2 breakfast show presenter, and some friends were entertained by Jenny Abramsky, then the controller of the BBC’s radio division, at a cost of £1,137 to the licence fee payer, to celebrate his knighthood. The location was not disclosed.

Ministers refused all requests for interviews yesterday, and officials said that the responsibility for dealing with expenses and financial matters rested with the BBC Trust.

Unusual patterns of spending at BBC need to be explained
Patrick Hosking: Analysis
At first glance the expenses claims of top BBC executives would raise few eyebrows in the senior echelons of companies in the private sector. The lunches, hotel stays and endless appetite for taxis is part of the quotidian life of senior executives.

But closer examination reveals some unusual patterns at the BBC. First, there is what might be called the luvvie factor. Bouquets on expenses, not to mention bottles of champagne and stays at hotels in Beverly Hills are plentiful.

They might not be unusual for board-level executives in large media companies, but financial controllers at a Midlands metal-basher would doubtless start asking awkward questions if confronted with repeated claims of such a nature.

Second, there is the occasional more questionable judgment, such as paying Jana Bennett, the director in charge of television, £500 in part-compensation after her handbag was stolen while off the premises.

This was claimed on a BBC insurance policy, but in the private sector, such a claim from a junior employee would stand little chance of success. Higher up the corporate ladder, different rules apply. Responsibility for the pay and expenses of main board directors rests with the remuneration committee of non-executive directors. Here, there tends to be much wider latitude to exercise discretion. Even so, non-execs are wary of setting a costly precedent.

Thirdly, there are many examples of entertainment of executives in private sector companies. It is this that looks most curious. Unlike the BBC, private sector companies have two key constituents who have to be constantly wooed and therefore lunched — their customers and their shareholders. To all intents and purposes the BBC has neither. Bankrolled by licence fee payers, it has no advertisers to schmooze and no City institutions to keep sweet. Instead, it seems to have got into the habit of entertaining its own suppliers — companies that would normally expect to pick up the tab on such occasions.

Executives at Xansa, the outsourcing company, were given a £646 meal. A meal for Infosys, the technology consultants, cost £744. Deloitte, the accounting firm, was treated to a £703 “thank you dinner”. Staff at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountants, were stood a £746 meal.

Zarin Patel, the BBC’s chief financial officer, even claimed for a £318 dinner given to the BBC’s own auditor KPMG — a firm that is paid £2 million in audit and other fees from the corporation each year.

Officials using public money rightly need to be careful about accepting entertainment from potential suppliers. Even so, the willingness of the BBC to pick up the tab looks odd.