Readers may remember that TVE, the organisation that had been involved in illicitly sponsored BBC shows, has apparently taken its website down. Commenters at Biased BBC noted that this appears to have happened on 24 October 2011.
There's a footnote in the BBC Trust report on the scandal about another of the organisations involved: FBC Media.
It has been reported that on 24 October 2011, FBC Media (UK) Ltd went into administration.
The same date.
Are FBC and TVE related in some way?
FBC Media appears to have journalist Alan Friedman as the sole director. The company was certainly in financial trouble, and it looks as if creditors are going to take a bath on FBC.
TVE, meanwhile, is a charity, owned and run by a parent charity called the Television Trust for the Environment (TVTE). TVE appears to produce the programmes and TVTE raises the funds. The parent appears to be in dire financial straits. There is no obvious connection to FBC though, so it may be that the BBC Trust's decision has simply pushed them over the edge at the same time as FBC.
But this is not the end of the story. Look at who's funding TVTE. Of their £1090k income, more than half is from the EU, with the rest mostly from the usual suspects - UNEP, Oxfam, FAO, UNFPA, UN etc etc. Now look at the accounts of TVE, the production company subsidiary. Of their total income of £1423k, only £48k (~3%) was from sales of TV programmes. The rest was donations, mostly from the parent charity, TVTE.
In other words, the content was being given away to TV stations in order to promote the interests of the international bureaucracies of the EU and UN. There are hints in the BBC Trust report, referring to programmes being purchased at nominal cost. But one doesn't quite get the right impression. And, as we saw yesterday, this may have been going on for fifteen years.