Auditor General Larry Dennis yesterday refuted Government's suggestion that former overseas tourism boss Glenn Bean's severance package was in line with a long-standing pension programme.

In his hard-hitting special report last week, Mr. Dennis revealed Mr. Bean was given $440,000 when his position as Director of Sales and Marketing was terminated in November 2007.

Mr. Dennis said the move came shortly after Mr. Bean started pressing for copies of media vendors' invoices from Tourism's advertising agency GlobalHue, an American company Bermuda taxpayers are said to have overpaid $1.8 million.

The Ministry of Tourism and Transport responded with a statement saying the New York Tourism Office's pension scheme was devised decades ago which meant departing employees regularly received large payouts.

However, yesterday Mr. Dennis argued that under that plan Mr. Bean would have received a cash payment of $9,000 for accumulated vacation pay, on top of $123,000 in pension benefits, giving him a total of $132,000.

Mr. Dennis explained Mr. Bean in fact received much more, stating: "The Director of Sales and Marketing was positioned well enough that he was able to negotiate further payments consisting of a lump sum of $62,580 payable immediately, $125,160 representing 12 monthly instalments of $10,430, and $123,589 representing the value of additional benefit entitlements which would have been payable if the Director were granted an additional six years of service based on a salary $40,649 in excess of his salary at termination."

The Auditor General also provided further evidence backing up his claim that advertising slots during a sports event — paid for in advance by Tourism — did not air.

He gave the press a copy of an e-mail from Raymond Cassidy of Bermuda Tourism to Paul White of GlobalHue, dated December 7, 2007, in which Mr. Cassidy wrote: "I finally got a chance to review the ESPN U telecast of the Big Apple Classic. According to the program brief we were supposed to have 2 spots during the telecast. I have rewound the tape back and forth and I cannot find any of our commercials during the telecast.

"What happened? Who is at fault here? Are we going to get a make good on another telecast or a refund for the value of the spots? I would appreciate getting an answer on this."

Following an apologetic reply, Mr. Cassidy wrote to Kevin Williams of GlobalHue asking for information on which spots could be given to Bermuda to make-up for the non-showing.

Mr. Williams replied on December 10, 2007: "Will do. Thx KW."

On January 27, 2009, Mr. Cassidy forwarded that e-mail stating: "This is the last response I got from Kevin Williams about the missing TV spots. I do not know if they ever made good on the missing spots."