Jeroen Pauw is once again under fire because of his controversial grab attempt in 2019, the year he stopped his talk show Pauw. “Big deal? No, no deal!” he shouts.
The NPO imposes a salary ceiling of about two tons per year on presenters. It is an open secret that TV stars can still earn more with all kinds of constructions. Jeroen Pauw’s agent also tried to make such a dubious appointment in 2019, but was then rejected by BNNVARA director Gert-Jan Hox.
Salary construction
The NRC wrote an extensive reconstruction in January 2020 about the end of the talk show Pauw and the creation of its successor Op1. The newspaper revealed, among other things, that BNNVARA refused to cooperate in ‘a prohibited construction’ that Jeroen and his production company TVBV had to ‘bring more money’.
Now, two and a half years later, the letter in question that team Pauw sent to BNNVARA at the time appears via BNR (see below). It is immediately apparent from the first paragraph that the intention was to keep this construction under wraps: “Due to the confidentiality of the content of this e-mail, I will send it to you, as agreed, to your private address.”
Continue with Peacock
The letter takes us back to 2019. The NPO was shocked in September of that year: Eva Jinek suddenly made the switch to RTL. Fortunately, the channel still had its other great latenight star: Jeroen Pauw. Or not? He suddenly put all kinds of bizarre financial demands on the table through his business partner, which can be read in the leaked letter.
Jeroen was willing to continue with his talk show in 2020, but then BNNVARA had to agree to a better financial deal. Part of this was a purchase guarantee: BNNVARA would then have to order programs for at least 500 thousand euros in 2020 from Jeroen’s company TVBV.
hypocritical
NRC already pointed out that Jeroen would earn more than the salary ceiling as a result of the new deal. Hypocritical, the newspaper said. He pointed out that Jeroen in the media always pretended that he liked that ceiling: “There hasn’t been a day in my entire career that I thought: I’m busier than the Prime Minister, so I’m fine with it. ”
BNNVARA refused to agree to a salary structure. A month and a half later, in October 2019, when Eva had already announced her departure, Jeroen informed the management that he was going to stop. Panic immediately arose at the NPO, because it was suddenly without a late talk show.
grab letter
Jeroen has also cleverly responded to that panic: to this day his company is still the producer of Op1 and that is not exactly made for next to nothing. The great NPO boss Frans Klein chose Jeroen because he had ‘all the expertise to land quickly’. Haste was called for, because the same Jeroen stopped so suddenly.
All in all, that conscious grab letter is now on the street and PVV MP Martin Bosma is in all states. Last week he proposed to interrogate NPO stars such as Jeroen and also Matthijs van Nieuwkerk under oath. “I find this revelation sensational, I have been working on the file for fifteen years,” he responds to BNR.
Jeroen responds
Jeroen also responds. He initially leaves it at a short response, in which he mainly points out that in the end no deal was concluded: “Big deal? No, no deal.”
But that the intention was there is already wrong enough? He adds: “I never and never do negotiations about contracts and money, etc. So I don’t know what is going on in negotiations. But I’m sure there was NEVER a link between whether or not to continue the daily talk show and a deal for TVBV.”
How can he be sure? “Because even in negotiations something like this, which relates to something that I was involved in on a daily basis, would always have been discussed with me.”
letter
The conscious letter from Jeroen’s agent to the BNNVARA boss:
Research
The NPO has now announced an independent investigation. Read more about this at BNR: