Former BBC director general Mark Thompson has expressed regret to the British public over his role in a failed digital media project that cost licence fee-payers almost £100m. Thompson, who left the publicly funded broadcaster in 2012 to become chief executive of the New York Times Company, told MPs at the Public Accounts Committee he “wanted to say sorry” for the collapse of the long-developed Digital Media Initiative (DMI).

In a move away from the use of videotape, the project was intended to allow staff to handle every aspect of video and audio content management from their desks. However, following a series of difficulties the DMI was suspended in 2012, before new director general Tony Hall took the decision to totally scrap it in May last year. The National Audit Office ascribed the £98.4m scheme’s failure to “confusion and lack of planning”, and Thompson cited additional factors such as poor quality and timing of information passed to management, coupled with a slow reaction to system problems.

Tony Hall, who quashed the project in his first weeks as BBC boss, described the plans as “a waste of huge amounts of licence fee payers’ money”. But Thompson insisted that he did not mislead MPs over the progression and success of the programme, when he told Parliament in 2011 that the project was on track and receiving very positive feedback from users “out in the business”.

“I don’t believe I have misled you on any other matter, and I don’t believe I misled you knowingly on this one,” he told the Committee, adding that his evidence was a “faithful and accurate account of my understanding of the project at that point”.

The Committee also found that the leader of the DMI – former BBC chief technology officer John Linwood – had been accused of “avoiding key meetings” to escape blame for the failing project. Linwood received a salary of £280,000 and was sacked weeks after his suspension for the multi-million-pound failure in May last year. The fallout from the shelved scheme compounds a series of recent controversies to hit the broadcaster, including oversized severance payments handed to departing executives.

Committee chair Margaret Hodge described the DMI project as a “disaster” spawned by a lack of governance. Referring to a Parliamentary report on the debacle, she said it “reads like a catalogue of how not to run a major programme”, and added: “I was shocked to learn how poor the BBC’s governance arrangements for the [scheme] were. There was no Senior Responsible Owner with complete oversight of all aspects of programme’s delivery.”

Hodge argued: “These failures go right to the top. The executive board applied insufficient scrutiny during 2011 and the first half of 2012 … The BBC Trust finance committee did not know until July 2012 that the DMI’s risk rating had increased to red for the period October to December 2011.

“The report clearly demonstrates why regular reviews are necessary – and why external reviewers should be listened to. If the BBC had established clearer accountability and stronger reporting, it could have recognised the issues much earlier and set about minimising the astronomic losses for the licence-fee payer.”