The Financial Times has details of the external costs of l'affaire Huw Edwards for the BBC.
According to a Freedom of Information enquiry response, the current total is £1.3m.
The BBC paid lawyers a total of £340,835 for advice 'connected with Edwards' employment', from October 2023 to September 2024. It's hard to imagine what tricky questions the lawyers were asked for this money. "Can we sack him ?" "Do we have to pay his pension ?". You might think the answers ought to have been ready from in-house lawyers, led by Sara Jones, on £330k pa.
£70k was paid out by the Corporate Investigations Team, to unspecified companies. You ain't seen me, get it ?
Topping the bill, a review of the effectiveness of its complaints policies and processes by Deloitte, which cost £958,133, to find out that somebody needs to check and refer, even when complaints are about demi-gods.
Could the BBC pay Deloitte another 5,652 licence fees to conduct a review of its review policy? Which might well need to be reviewed - perhaps by Deloitte? Or would that risk a sort of consultancy howlround that would end up costing the entire BBC budget?
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