Shane Ross

In the late 1990s, I was a journalist full-time, and I sent a question in to them, which was a very innocent one, which was, could you just give me the attendance of board meetings of board members?

And I got an absolutely outraged reply.

This was absolutely none of my business, and they don't answer questions of that sort.

I thought that these guys must have something to hide.

And I came across this kind of brick wall of RTE all the way through my journalistic career.

And I'd always wanted to take an interest in them.

Why now?

Well, I was actually starting looking at them when the scandal broke, when the scandal broke in 2023.

Yeah, I mean, he was part of it.

He was certainly part of it, and he was certainly the face of it.

And he certainly wasn't without wrongdoing himself, because he obviously didn't put his hand up when he should have done.

And it became known as the Tiberius scandal, which I think annoys him a lot.

And I think it's kind of justification, because it got much bigger.

The moment that the Tiberius issue, which was the issue of pay not being transparent, it opened up

a whole litany of scandals within RT which weren't known about.

It opened up the issue of the barter accounts.

That's where the under-the-radar duperity money went.

And it opened the barter accounts with a kind of secret, what the Iraqis...

senators and TDs called Slush Fund, which was operated by RT.

And once they got into that Slush Fund, they found all sorts of things which people will be familiar with, you know, all the flip-flops and all that sort of thing, Soho Club in London.