Who's funding EUou, BBC?

Now, we already know that the BBC has received money from the EU in the past, but this - from the Spectator (£) - looks like a questions-really-need-answering kind of scoop to me, and quite damning against the BBC:

Over the last three years the BBC has secretly obtained millions of pounds in grants from the European Union. Licence fee payers might assume that the Corporation would have been compelled to disclose the source of this money in its annual reports, but they bear no trace of it specifically. In the latest set of accounts, for example, these funds are simply referred to as ‘other grant income’.

Instead of making an open declaration, the BBC’s successful lobbying for this money had to be prised out of it using a Freedom of Information (FoI) request lodged for The Spectator, proving that there was never any danger of the state broadcaster’s bosses volunteering it willingly.

The FoI response confirms that BBC staff applied for, and accepted, about £3 million of EU funds between April 2011 and November 2013, most of which has been spent on unspecified ‘research and development’ projects, with the remaining £1 million spent on programming.

A sly and slippery BBC at it again, by the looks of it, being dragged, kicking and screaming, by FoI requests, into disclosing funding it most definitely didn't want us to know about. 

Please take a read of the whole article.

I've long thought the charges of pro-EU bias on the BBC's part are some of the most clear-cut cases of BBC bias, and this sort of thing pours fuel onto the already-raging fire even more.