As a BBC “lifer”, Alan Yentob has stayed for more than four decades, as first Morecambe and Wise, then Des Lynam and Michael Grade jumped ship for the rewards of the commercial sector.

Now the corporation’s creative director has emerged as the financial winner with the disclosure that his pension pot is worth £6.3m. It will pay him an annual income of £216,667 for the rest of his life.

The huge retirement benefits accrued by Yentob and a group of fellow BBC lifers, calculated by Hargreaves Lansdown, the financial services group, overturn the received wisdom that media executives need to leave the corporation to earn fortunes.

Yentob and other senior BBC managers – some who rank below the corporation’s board level – have racked up retirement benefits that exceed those of any senior civil servants in charge of running great government departments.

Mark Byford, the deputy director-general, and Yentob both have pensions worth more than that of Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England. Five BBC executives have pensions valued at more than that of Sir Liam Donaldson, the country’s chief medical officer. Four have retirement benefits worth more than those to be enjoyed by Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the chief of the defence staff.

Hargreaves Lansdown found that five of the 10 largest public sector pension pots belonged to BBC executives.

Yentob joined the corporation in 1968, working his way up from producing arts programmes to serve as controller of first BBC2 and then BBC1.

His pension pot ballooned – along with his salary – over the past decade, when he faced an embarrassing investigation into his expenses, which revealed a fondness for chauffeur-driven cars and flight upgrades.

The 2004 inquiry cleared him of wrongdoing, but Yentob was criticised for taking “insufficient care over some aspects of his affairs”.

It also emerged that BBC licence-fee payers paid for a party at Yentob’s mock Tudor mansion in Somerset. The event was said to be a valuable networking opportunity for BBC executives and celebrities.

Now he serves part-time as the BBC’s creative director and receives a pro-rata salary of £325,000, according to figures disclosed by the BBC last week.

The analysis by Hargreaves Lansdown reveals the sum an individual would have to pay to buy the retirement income enjoyed by senior BBC and other public sector executives. It found that Byford has the biggest public sector pension pot.

After working at the BBC for 30 years, Byford is already entitled to receive £229,500 every year for the rest of his life from a pot valued at £7.7m.

If he sees out his final nine years at the BBC, however, Hargreaves Lansdown estimates that he could ultimately receive an inflation-linked pension of £298,000 a year. The cost of buying an annuity to pay such an income would be more than £10m.

The research also found: Richard Sambrook, head of global news, has accumulated a pension pot of £4.8m that will pay an annual income of £142,583. Pat Loughrey, director of nations and regions, has amassed a pension valued at £4.1m, which will pay £122,916 a year. Mark Thompson, the director-general, has two pots in the same BBC final-salary pension scheme. The first, earned between 1979 and 2001, is valued at £2.9m and will pay £85,946 a year. The second, earned during his five years as director-general, will pay £10,300 a year.

Hargreaves Lansdown said leaving the broadcaster for three years had “substantially reduced” Thompson’s pension.

Staff who joined the BBC before 2006 received a fixed proportion of their final salary, accumulating at the rate of one 60th for each year in employment.

Since then, the payout is linked to a proportion of the staffer’s career average salary. The BBC still markets this benefit to potential recruits.

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