Laconic

There appears to have been a remarkable volte-face over BBC Monitoring's mini-DMI fiasco. Up until now it was reported that the project, named "Socrates" was brought to an end after spending of £8.35m; now the BBC's line is that,"as a result of the amicable settlement agreement with Autonomy (an HP company), the BBC did not suffer a loss on the value of the contract, and has on-going use of the hardware and some of the software."

The dogged "Oliver Lacon" has been pursuing this over the past nine months, through Freedom of Information enquiries. The BBC has now published minutes of Finance Committee meetings which track the lack of progress on the project. These in themselves are remarkable for the times important execs like Mark Thompson and Zarin Patel didn't attend, and discussions on how the project had fallen foul of the BBC's own processes. There are many redactions, and upside down pages, but I'm sure we haven't heard the end of this one, once Oliver has read them through...