The BBC has been accused of taking sponsorship from a soft drinks manufacturer in breach of its own rules amid growing disquiet about the corporation’s profit-making ventures.

ITV has written to Mark Thompson, the corporation’s director-general, to complain about a series of commercial contracts that it claims amount to “advertising by the back door”.

The deal that sparked the row was the sponsorship for a reported £200,000 of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year event by Robinsons, the fruit squash brand owned by Britvic. The Robinsons logo was frequently displayed on screen and Sue Barker, the presenter, plugged the sponsor repeatedly during the show in December, which was watched at its peak by 9.3m viewers.

On the Radio 5 Live coverage of the awards, the presenter thanked Robinsons, explaining that he had to because “it’s part of their contract”.

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The BBC claims the deals do not breach the rules banning it from accepting sponsorship or advertising money because the private-sector partners pay such fees to a separate organisation, not direct to the BBC.

The assault on the state-funded broadcaster is being masterminded by Michael Grade, the ITV boss who until 2006 was chairman of the BBC’s governors.

“Grade knows all the BBC’s sensitive pressure points,” said a source. “The commercial broadcasters have watched the BBC’s encroachment into their own traditional territory with growing unease. The Robinsons deal was a provocation too far.”

The protest came as the BBC’s financial chief claimed the corporation needed to become more commercially minded to survive. Zarin Patel, its finance director, said she was even considering a £2 billion stock market flotation of BBC Worldwide, the broadcaster’s commercial arm.

“The real challenge is that we are essentially a fixed-income business,” she said. “We have to make everything go further.”

The BBC is banned from receiving money from commercial sponsors to fund programming. The corporation instead asks backers to pay for the cost of “events” that it promotes. However, ITV claims that this is a bogus distinction, especially in the case of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, which is devised specifically for television.

A spokeswoman for the BBC said: “All of the activities questioned by ITV in its letter breach neither the letter nor the spirit of the BBC’s guidelines.

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