A senior BBC executive who earns over £200,000 a year as the broadcasting’s editorial director has returned a £12,000 speaking fee to a hedge fund last week after a backlash from colleagues. Kamal Ahmed was one of those in the BBC Team which recently announced 450 job cuts across BBC News. Now, it has emerged that he carried out two other paid engagements, at a property developer and a government-run bank.
Ahmed spoke for St Modwen Properties, a £1.2bn property developer based in Birmingham, last year and also made an appearance at an event held by the British Business Bank at the Institute of Engineering and Technology in central London last year.
He has now declined to reveal how much he had been paid for the events or whether he would pay it back. However, he has apologised for accepting payment for a 40-minute address at Aberdeen Standard Investments, a hedge fund. He is listed on five booking websites as a speaker, commanding fees of between £10,000 and £20,000.
Mary Greenham, Ahmed’s agent, said he had “stepped in” to speak at St Modwen on March 21, 2019, “after a colleague was not able to make it” and had chaired a breakfast panel on February 11 of the same year for a small business finance conference organised by the state-owned British Business Bank. The bank declined to reveal Ahmed’s fee, citing “commercial exemption” to Freedom of Information laws.
Ahmed joined the BBC in 2014 as business editor. The corporation declined to reveal how many paid external events he had carried out since he became editorial director in November 2018 and refused to say whether an investigation would follow.
