C4 news host paid £15k from aid budget for junket in Mexico
CHANNEL 4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy was paid £15,000 in taxpayer cash from Britain’s foreign aid budget for just several hours work at a junket.
He faced embarrassment yesterday when he claimed to be unaware that the money for his trip to Mexico came from the public purse and promised to give it back to charity.
Mr Guru-Murthy was joined at the summit by BBC News presenter Zeinab Badawi, who cost £14,000 to hire through an agency.
Revelations about the payouts came as it emerged that billions of pounds earmarked to help impoverished countries is being handed to wealthy consultants.
Executives are earning six-figure salaries paid in public money to complete dubious projects and reports despite Government promises to prevent misuse of aid cash.
Its insistence that payments to consultancy firms had all but stopped was rubbished as Whitehall documents revealed that the annual bill for private contractors had doubled to almost £1billion.
Some consultants are raking in more than £1,000-a-day to provide advice and guidance on how the UK should spend money that is supposed to help poor communities throughout the world.
Downing Street said yesterday that Theresa May wanted to see an end to the lavish payments.
Her official spokesman said: ‘The Government has been very clear that we want to make sure that taxpayers’ money is being spent in the most effective and efficient way. There have already been steps taken to make sure that aid ends up where it should be – helping the world’s poorest.’
International Development Secretary Priti Patel has launched an investigation following the revelations, including the payment to Mr Guru-Murthy. She is considering forcing aid providers to publish all their contracts for scrutiny.
The agency through which Mr Guru-Murthy was hired charged £26,000. Both he and Miss Badawi chaired meetings attended by ministers at the two-day event in Mexico in 2014 hosted by the Global Partnership for Effective Development.
It is understood that Mr GuruMurthy received £15,000 and paid his agent £2,250. He has promised to donate his fee to a development charity and said he would not have carried out the work if he had known it was being funded by the Department for International Development (DfiD).
Official documents state that DfiD has spent no money on consultancy payments in the past three years. It also said payments for ‘external consultancy and advisory services’ currently stood at £200,000, a reduction of almost 99 per cent in the past seven years.
But an analysis of 72,000 documents detailing financial transactions between DfiD and consultants carried out by The Times found that it paid a staggering £3.4billion between 2011 and 2015.
Britain’s huge aid budget – which now exceeds £12billion – has been mired in controversy over claims that much of the money is wasted on bureaucracy. A series of reports in the Daily Mail have also revealed numerous cases in which the cash is squandered on controversial projects.
Hundreds of businesses and other organisations providing consultancy firms are known to have benefited from the significant increase in payments.
Accounting giant PwC earned an astonishing £6.3million in fees from an aid project costing £8.5million to help Papua, Indonesia, according to The Times.
It has received £168.8million from the foreign aid budget since 2011. London-based consultants Adam Smith International was paid £296million in the same period.
DfiD yesterday said the figures were based on preliminary research and that the eventual costs were significantly lower.