TV's Wark paid herself £200,000 as firm made loss of £1m

BBC presenter Kirsty Wark paid herself £200,000 as a director of the independent TV company she part-owns with her husband in the same financial year the firm made a loss of more than £1 million, it has emerged.

Details of the payment emerged in reports filed at Companies House for the TV company Wark Clements for the year ending April 2004.

One director, understood to be Wark, was paid 200,000, while the Newsnight presenter's husband, Alan Clements, was paid 75,000 as a director, the accounts show.

Glasgow-based Wark Clements merged with Ideal World, the company run by Muriel Gray and her husband, Hamish Barbour, to form IWC Media at the end of March 2004.

Wark Clements' accounts show that the company recorded a pre-tax trading loss of 1,076,933 in the 2003/04 financial year.

The loss came despite a rise in revenues to more than 12 million, up from 9.4 million the previous year.

Wark Clements ended the financial year with a 1 million overdraft and 409,000 in the bank.

The TV maker was left dependent on the financial support of its bankers and personal guarantees from the directors, the reports reveal.

A spokesman for IWC said last night that the reports represented a period of investment activity by Wark Clements in preparation for its merger with Ideal World. Any suggestion that the merger was prompted by financial difficulties at Wark Clements was "bonkers", he said.

"Wark Clements is now well back into the black and profitable," the spokesman said, adding that figures out shortly for the combined IWC would show "a healthy profit".

The accounts treat Wark Clements and Ideal World as separate trading entities and Ideal World has always remained profitable, IWC said.

IWC Media, which has offices in Glasgow and London, is in the top ten of UK independent production companies.

Originally specialising in current affairs and documentaries, it has found success in the lifestyle market with the popular Location Location Location series. Other major commissions have included a ten-part series on the First World War and a documentary, Hunting the Washington Sniper, both for Channel 4.

Like other independent TV companies, IWC is set to benefit from the Communications Act 2004, which allows programme makers to retain the rights to their shows after they have been shown by the commissioning channel.

That freedom has sparked a round of possible consolidation between the leading indies, with reports linking IWC to merger talks with RDF Media, makers of Wife Swap, and also to Hat Trick, whose credits include Whose Line is it Anyway?.

More controversially, IWC became involved in a stand-off with the official inquiry into the Holyrood Parliament building, after it refused to hand over untransmitted material for the documentary The Gathering Place, which it made for BBC Scotland.

Lord Fraser, the Holyrood inquiry chairman, finally closed his investigation in April after watching unbroadcast interviews with architect Enric Miralles and the late First Minister, Donald Dewar.

Wark was the subject of a separate row in January after it was revealed that the First Minister, Jack McConnell, and his family had spent New Year at her villa in Majorca, a move that critics claimed undermined her impartiality as a journalist.