Esther Mucientes Madrid
Madrid
Updated Friday, March 8, 2024-7:31 p.m.
Until 2025, RTVE renewed Silvia Intxaurrondo for 537,000 euros on the same day as her tough interview with Alberto Núñez Feijóo
The information published this Monday by EL MUNDO about the renewal of Silvia Intxaurrondo is "correct" and "truthful."
This has been confirmed to this newspaper by three senior officials in the current RTVE organizational chart, plus a fourth source, a former director of the public entity until recently.
The journalist's renewal file was opened on the afternoon of July 17, 2023, hours
after her electoral interview with Alberto Núñez Feijóo, for a total of 537,514 euros to be distributed over two years.
One of the senior officials yesterday expressed his astonishment at
Intxaurrondo's "desire for prominence"
, in reference to the message he published at midday on X, formerly known as Twitter.
In her tweet, the journalist announced the sending of a burofax to Joaquín Manso, director of EL MUNDO.
"I hope you have, at least, the decency to recognize the falsehood of what you have published," the journalist wrote.
This newspaper now provides more details about the information it published this Monday about the journalist's controversial renewal, all confirmed by senior officials of the Public Entity.
Both the date of the beginning of the renewal file and the agreed amounts also appear in an internal document from senior management of RTVE and in the contracts
of the journalist and The Pool Management, producer of the program
El mejor de la Historia
, to which he has also had access to this newspaper.
According to these sources, the renewal file for the presenter of the morning show
La Hora de La 1
- described as a "new contract", according to the documentation that this newspaper has, once the production company Tesseo stopped producing the program - was opened on the 17th. July 2023 in the afternoon, just hours after Feijóo left the set.
Contract negotiations began in mid-June.
On one side, the top management of the public channel.
On the other,
Silvia Intxaurrondo
and her husband,
Jhinaoui Farouk
, with whom she established the company
Sukun Comunicación SL
, the company that the journalist established on July 27, 2023, four days after the general elections of 23-J, to collect the aforementioned amount.
Once the renewal was promoted on July 17, the signature by the presenter occurred on August 16.
Two days later, the acting president of the RTVE Corporation,
Elena Sánchez
, signed it by electronic signature on August 18.
The contract was signed for two years, until 2025, with the following breakdown:
700 euros
for presenting each of the
260 annual programs
, an amount that is not received on days when there is no program - such as, for example, New Year's or Christmas - nor on vacation or medical leave.
Thus, if it completes all of the 260 programs signed in its new contract, Intxaurrondo would receive 182,000 euros, which for two years adds up to a total of 364,000 euros.
To this daily amount we must add another 787 euros per day for 11 months as co-director of
La Hora de La 1
, until adding a total for the two years of 173,514 euros.
The sum of both amounts reaches the figure indicated in the 'Justification' section of RTVE's internal expenses document:
537,514 euros
.
The three directors of RTVE have also confirmed that the contract of the production company
The Pool Management
with the public corporation for the program
El Mejor de la Historia
, which seeks to decide who is the most influential Spaniard of all time, establishes that the salary of
Intxaurrondo
for presenting each delivery of the space is 25,000 euros.
The total number of deliveries agreed upon by RTVE and The Pool is six, which means that
if the entire contract is fulfilled you will receive an extra 150,000 euros
.
It is worth highlighting the duration of the "new contract".
Until that moment, Intxaurrondo renewed quarterly with the production company Tesseo.
However, on the eve of elections in which a change in the Government was predicted, the format of the contract became biannual.
EL MUNDO met this Wednesday with
Jhinaoui Farouk
, the journalist's husband and sole administrator of the Sukun company, of which she is joint and several administrator.
The meeting took place after two phone calls from Farouk in which he assured that he "had all the documentation to prove the falsity of the newspaper's information" and that "he had no problem showing it."
In that conversation,
Jhinaoui Farouk
informed EL MUNDO of the date of the start of the first conversations with RTVE to sign a new contract and the date of its signing.
Without Jhinaoui Farouk requesting any rectification, EL MUNDO limited itself to updating the information with the new data of the process and, subsequently, closed a meeting with him so that he could show him "the papers" that would refute the information.
Already at the meeting, when EL MUNDO asked him for the documentation that he had agreed to show, Farouk only showed two papers.
The first was a list of emails, with the subject and content crossed out, in which only the date of sending was visible
and which, according to Farouk, corresponded to the beginning of negotiations with RTVE.
The second was an official document from the RTVE Transparency portal
in which the Public Corporation responded to a journalist's question about Intxaurrondo's salary for presenting
La Hora de La 1
and
El Mejor de la Historia
.
The answer in that official document was:
"700 euros per day as presenter of La Hora de La 1" and "25,000 euros for each program on El Mejor de la Historia"
.
That is, exactly the same figures that EL MUNDO had already published.
Farouk then focused his efforts on removing the information that the start of the renovation occurred on the same day as Feijóo's interview.
He also insisted that he wanted to reach an agreement "in good faith" without having to send a burofax.
After reconfirming from the same sources and two additional ones that all their information was true, this newspaper informed the couple that it did not accept their request for rectification
.
This Friday, Intxaurrondo used its social networks again to attack this newspaper and announce the sending of a burofax, which at the time of publication of this news had not reached any of the newspaper's offices.
Meanwhile, senior officials of the public entity do not hide their astonishment at the escalation of their journalist's networks, which they attribute to his "desire for prominence", in addition to the fear of the comparative insult that his large salary, which triples that of his colleagues, produces in his colleagues. journalists of similar public relevance.