When only a week has passed due to the commotion caused by the salaries received by the RTVE presenters, the controversy over the cost of the second edition of the Benidorm Fest, held last February, arrives, and the controversy not only over the salary of its presenters but because of the abysmal difference between what Mónica Naranjo and Rodrigo Vázquez received and what the third presenter of the festival, Inés Hernand, received.
The public channel not only invested 42% more in this edition of the Benidorm Fest than the previous year, but one of its presenters, Inés Hernand, received 35,000 euros less than her other two colleagues, the singer Mónica Naranjo and the presenter Rodrigo Vázquez , as revealed by RTVE after a public request to its Transparency portal.
The celebration of Benidorm Fest 2023, which Blanca Paloma and her EaEa won, cost the public entity 4,069,328 euros, which represented an increase of 41.58% compared to the previous year. According to the figures, the greatest expense was the payment to the producers, 2,472,000 euros, followed by the cost of RTVE technical personnel, 659,449 euros.
The expense in “technical means” of the Public Corporation also exceeds 100,000 euros, which has doubled compared to 2022. Between “per diems and accommodation” and “restaurant and drinks” RTVE also spent just over 100,000 euros.
However, the controversy has not only come from the increase in the costs of the festival, but also from the salaries of its presenters. The Benidorm Fest 2023 had three presenters: Mónica Naranjo, Rodrigo Vázquez and Inés Hernand. The only one who repeated was Hernand, but, coincidentally, the one who received the least was her, with a difference of 35,000 euros compared to what her other two colleagues received.
However, as published by Público, Rodrigo Vázquez has denied that this was the amount he received for presenting the Benidorm Fest 2023, assuring the newspaper that the real amount “is very far” from those 50,000 euros.
In the budget with the Boomerang TV production company “the following amounts appear without identifying the name of the presenters to whom it corresponds: presenter 50,000.02 euros, presenter 15,000.02 euros and presenter 50,000.02 euros.” And although it does not reveal the names of who each amount corresponds to, the presenter is more than obvious, since there was only one, and the presenters have made it clear after a tweet from Inés Hernando that, although ironic, clearly shows her anger.
“Come on with this very small, testimonial and symbolic difference of earning €35,000 less than my two fellow presenters at the Benidorm fest, look how laughable and how good I feel”, the presenter and comedian wrote this Wednesday, adding multiple clown emoticons.
It is not the first time that the presenter charges a lower amount than her colleagues. In the last edition of the Benidorm Fest presented by Alaska, Máximo Huerta and Inés Hernand, she earned 10,500 euros less than her colleagues. While the singer and the writer received 18,000 euros, Hernand received 7,500.
Those who did not receive anything were the national and international jury in charge of choosing the winner and, therefore, Spain’s representative for Eurovision 2023. As reported by RTVE to Público, “the budget includes an item of 4,000 euros as ‘jury guest expenses international’ which were used to cover the accommodation and travel expenses of two members of the international jury, while the rest of the jury stayed in the accommodation provided by the Benidorm City Council and their travel expenses were managed through requests for diets as ‘guests’. In total, the cost of the jury was 23,600 euros.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project