York’s VC claimed over £16,000 in expenses last year

York’s Vice-Chancellor claimed over £16,000 in expenses last year, on top of his annual salary of nearly £250k.

An FOI request revealed the high level of spending for the last academic year, which included over £9,500 on flights and nearly £3,500 on hotels.

Vice-Chancellor Koen Lamberts also claimed £635.64 towards lunch and £49.99 towards magazine subscriptions.

The total figure of £16,415.10 was over £2,000 more than his expenses claim for the year before.

Koen Lamberts flew to China and the US last year

A complete breakdown of expenditure for each year can be found below.

Flights: £9,664.52 (£7,647.80 the year before)

Trains: £2,607.60 (£2,682.50)

Taxis: £10 (£155.94)

Hotels: £3277 (£3473.87)

Lunch: £635.64 (£205.92)

Parking: £2.62 (£0)

Baggage: £49.85 (£0)

Visa: £117.88 (£0)

Subscriptions: £49.99 (£0)

Oyster card: £0 (£60.65)

Wi-Fi: £0 (£3.25)

Hotel/City tax: £0 (£21.95)

Total: £16,415.10 (£14,251.88)

This spending comes on top of an already eye-watering annual salary of £234,254 (including benefits in kind and a contribution to relocation costs).

Such a vast amount of money may be difficult to comprehend for students who barely know what to do with their loan, so we’ve broken that salary down into more easily digestible figures.

£234,254 could buy you any of the following:

Over 300,000 packets of Skittles from the campus vending machines.

It’s how I maintain the face weight

Over 80,000 chicken and bacon baguettes from the Roger Kirk Centre Costa outlet.

Seven brand new full-spec VW Polo GTIs with over £26,000 left to spend on associated running costs.

7 of these? Think of all the Drive-Thru McDonalds

Just a little under 9.3kg of gold bullion.

A 1981 GL Class custom container ship (244 ft.), currently anchored in Mozambique. The purchase would leave just shy of 10k remaining, enough for business class flights to Mozambique and overnight accommodation in a top hotel.

Custom configuration and ready for quick sale

A 2005 Robinson R44 Raven I Helicopter in Black Metallic Colourway.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’m sure the Vice Chancellor would go without his salary for a year if it meant we could have a 70m container ship moored alongside Greg’s Place.