phone hacking

Common Sense: A Murdoch’s Missed Opportunity

August 6, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

After four years of silence, and just hours after the News Corporation said it would stop paying, he stepped before television cameras outside his home to say, “I have no further comment to make at this stage.” He added, “This may change.” Mr. Mulcaire is said to employ a lawyer full time as well as several more part time, an arrangement he surely can’t afford for long on a private investigator’s income.

In Parliament, the Labour member Paul Farrelly asked James Murdoch, who heads the company’s international operations, if he understood why people might interpret paying those legal fees as an effort to buy the private investigator’s cooperation or silence.

Mr. Murdoch murmured his agreement, saying his lawyers had told him “it’s important and customary” to pay such fees. “I’ve asked for those things to cease.”

After the company cut Mr. Mulcaire loose, two former executives came forward to accuse Mr. Murdoch of being “mistaken” in his testimony to Parliament about his knowledge of phone hacking. Now Mr. Murdoch is under investigation for potentially misleading Parliament.

As Mr. Farrelly put it, “It now seems to be everyone for themselves. The edifice is cracking. They’re all fighting like rats in a sack.”

However controversial in Britain, the practice of companies’ paying their officers and employees’ legal expenses in criminal investigations is not only routine in America but has been elevated by some to the status of a constitutional right. A little-discussed but open secret among defense lawyers and prosecutors alike is that who pays the legal fees often decides the outcome of an investigation.

As John C. Coffee Jr., Berle professor of law at Columbia, told me: “Someone whose legal fees are not paid may have a strong and urgent need to cooperate with the government. The employee, if he can’t afford to defend himself, has to cut a deal, and he might, shall we say, color his testimony. Who’s going to get the benefit of that, the company or the government? Lawyers know very well how to coach witnesses on what to say without telling them to lie.”

Confronted in the 1990s with an unprecedented wave of white-collar crime at major corporations like Enron and WorldCom, Justice Department prosecutors grew exasperated with companies that made public pledges to cooperate with investigators only to unleash a phalanx of defense lawyers bent on anything but.

In 2003, when he was chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Larry Thompson wrote that a factor in whether a company, as opposed to individuals, would be charged with a crime would be the extent of its cooperation, one measure of which “is whether the corporation appears to be protecting its culpable employees and agents,” among other things, “through the advancing of attorneys fees.” Mr. Thompson might well have added lavish severance packages and other forms of hush money to the list.

In 2005, the accounting firm KPMG admitted to creating fraudulent tax shelters that enabled wealthy clients to evade $2.5 billion in federal taxes, and six former partners, including the firm’s former deputy chairman, were indicted. KPMG, as it had in the past, paid their legal bills. All pleaded not guilty and declined to cooperate with the government.

As an accounting firm dependent on public trust, KPMG recognized that its survival depended on the firm’s escaping criminal charges. At a meeting with prosecutors, the firm’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, emphasized that KPMG “had decided to change course and cooperate fully.” The prosecutors zeroed in on the issue of legal fees, with one saying that “misconduct should not be rewarded” and another warning that with respect to legal fees, “we’ll look at that under a microscope,” according to notes taken at the meeting.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e50769ec3c79c874d7aa2af06d601f4b

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: berle, phone hacking, private investigator

Media Cache: Making Newspapers, Not Plastic Buckets

July 24, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

“It is shocking that some of the board members should want to run a media institution like a company producing plastic buckets, with purely commercial considerations and unethical practices overwhelming editorial interests and values, thereby damaging the credibility of the newspaper,” the letter continues. Those conditions, the writer declares, have “made my continuance as editor untenable.”

Another departure from News Corp., following revelations of phone hacking by one of the company’s newspapers?

No. The letter was written last spring by N. Ravi, former editor of The Hindu newspaper of India, to announce his resignation. As the News Corp. scandal unfolds, his florid prose has been circulating on the Internet, his concerns seemingly of broader relevance to a troubled newspaper industry, even if the proximate cause — a boardroom feud — is different.

The unethical practices at the News Corp. tabloid, The News of the World, are an extreme example of what can happen when newspapers go the way of plastic buckets.

Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who intercepted voice mail messages for The News of the World, has said he was under “relentless pressure” from the paper to deliver headline-worthy information. There are also growing suggestions — though no hard evidence, yet — that The News of the World was not the only British paper to hire phone hackers like Mr. Mulcaire.

Journalistic competition is mostly a good thing. But in Britain, newspapers may be suffering from too much of a good thing.

Few Fleet Street papers make any money, and times are especially tough on the high-quality end of the market. The Times of London, which is also owned by News Corp., loses tens of millions of pounds a year. The Guardian, which has led the way in uncovering the phone-hacking scandal, reported an operating loss of £33 million, or $53.8 million, for its most recent financial year.

The Guardian survives because it is owned by a well-endowed charitable foundation. The Times survives largely because Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corp., loves newspapers.

In a publicly traded company like News Corp., these kinds of losses have to be balanced out with earnings from other operations. So The News of the World was expected to deliver sizable profits — and did. The Sun, a News Corp. tabloid, is also a big moneymaker.

With a sudden void of more than 2.6 million newspapers — the circulation of The News of the World — in the British market, it is not surprising that no one seems to be talking about filling it with unprofitable broadsheets.

Instead, all expectations are that, once the dust settles, News Corp. will move toward seven-day publishing of The Sun. Associated Newspapers, which produces The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday — “middle-market” tabloids with no Page 3 girls but lots of scare stories about immigrants — may introduce a lower-end tabloid to try to mop up leftover News of the World readers.

In the short term, the biggest beneficiary of the scandal was The Sunday Mirror, another tabloid, which reportedly added more than 700,000 sales on the first Sunday without a News of the World. The demise of The News of the World has also given a lift to The Mail on Sunday, as well as two papers whose journalistic contributions are especially meager: The Sunday Express and The Daily Star Sunday.

In other words, if anyone was expecting the demise of The News of the World to result in a new commitment to editorial quality over commercial considerations, forget it.

In the longer term, if British tabloids are no longer able to engage in phone hacking and other unsavory practices to generate scoops, the tabloids might fall out of favor. For now, the plastic buckets could come in handy.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/business/media/making-newspapers-not-plastic-buckets.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: editorial interests, hard evidence, phone hacking

Suspicions About Former Editor in Battle Over Story Complicate Hacking Scandal

July 23, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

But the day before The Telegraph was to run the article, the paper was scooped by Robert Peston, the business editor of the BBC. Mr. Peston reported that “a whistle-blower” had provided him with a secretly recorded conversation between The Telegraph’s undercover reporters and Mr. Cable.

Senior editors at The Telegraph, furious that Mr. Peston had somehow beat them on their own story, suspected they were the victims of corporate espionage.

As the editors saw it, the person who stole the audiotape of Mr. Cable was either an enemy of the newspaper or someone with a motive to see Mr. Cable replaced by an official more willing to push forward the Murdochs’ bid for BSkyB, as the network is known.

Or, perhaps, the perpetrator was someone who fit both bills. The editors said they instantly suspected the hidden hand of William Lewis, the newspaper’s former editor in chief, who was dismissed from the Telegraph Media Group in May 2010 after a dispute with company executives. Mr. Lewis was now working at News International, the British subsidiary of the News Corporation.

The editors’ suspicions grew when a computer technician at The Telegraph, Jim Robinson, left in January to work for Mr. Lewis at News International. The two celebrated the appointment over pints at a pub.

The episode is significant because in recent weeks Mr. Lewis, 42, has emerged as a leader of the News Corporation’s campaign to clean up the phone-hacking and police bribery scandal that has engulfed the company and raised questions about the judgment of its top executives. He is a member of the News Corporation’s Management and Standards Committee.

The tale of the tape is yet another twist in a scandal that has ricocheted between the people making the news and those reporting it. Those in the anything-goes British press corps had already been suspicious of one another’s methods and motives. Now, every “splash” — a tabloid’s Page 1 story — is assumed to have been “nicked,” or stolen, by a hacked phone or other illicit means.

Within days of Mr. Peston’s scoop last December, The Telegraph hired Kroll, the security firm, to try to determine whether the newspaper was the victim of computer hacking or outright theft of the audio recording, and to identify who might have been responsible.

“It is a matter of record that Kroll was commissioned to investigate the unauthorized removal in December 2010 of an audio recording from Telegraph Media Group,” a Telegraph spokesman said Friday. “They concluded that the removal of the recording was, in all probability, an act of theft orchestrated by an external organization.”

Kroll found circumstantial evidence that Mr. Lewis and Mr. Robinson were behind the episode, according to a summary of its work, though it stressed in its report that investigators had not found direct proof of the link.

Mr. Lewis declined to answer questions about the episode but released a statement through a spokesman. “This is a clear attempt to undermine the strong working relationship between News Corp.’s Management and Standards Committee and the Metropolitan Police Service,” Mr. Lewis said. “Nothing will prevent us from continuing to cooperate fully with Operation Weeting,” the police investigation into illegal phone hacking at The News of the World, a Murdoch newspaper, now defunct, at the heart of the scandal.

A News International spokesman said Mr. Robinson had declined to comment.

Neither Mr. Peston nor the BBC would answer questions on how he had obtained the interview.

Kroll also declined to be interviewed for this article, saying it does not remark on matters concerning clients.

The Telegraph spokesman declined to comment further or to identify remedies it might have put in place to prevent such an episode from recurring.

The New York Times has pieced together a detailed account of Kroll’s internal inquiry through interviews with executives at The Telegraph and a review of Kroll’s executive summary of its work, which was completed last March.

Kroll found that a tight circle of former employees had “strong motivations to damage The Telegraph,” and that they included Mr. Lewis. Kroll investigators concluded that as The Telegraph was preparing its article in December, Mr. Lewis learned about it from a former colleague at the newspaper.

Kroll wrote in its report that it suspected that Mr. Lewis was “involved in orchestrating the leak of the information.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=15104887ea2d4bd9b4df17c572480ed1

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: audiotape, business editor, phone hacking

Pressure on Murdochs Mounts in Hacking Scandal

July 23, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Tom Watson, a Labour lawmaker who has taken a leading role in the hacking inquiries, said he was asking the police to investigate whether James Murdoch had misled a parliamentary committee in his testimony on Tuesday.

Those and other developments put renewed pressure on the Murdochs and seemed to frustrate efforts by the company and its global parent, News Corporation, to contain the damage and put the scandal behind it.

Separately, another Labour lawmaker said he had written to nonexecutive directors of News Corporation urging that James and Rupert Murdoch be suspended from their roles in running the company.

Also, the authorities in Scotland opened an investigation into phone hacking and police corruption that could put new focus on Andy Coulson, a former editor of The News of the World, a tabloid that the company shuttered. He testified at a trial there that he knew nothing about phone hacking.

Mr. Cameron continued Friday to distance himself from the Murdochs and their newspapers, whose support helped usher him into power just over a year ago, as the scandal continued to raise questions about the close ties between his government and News International executives.

“Clearly, James Murdoch has got questions to answer in Parliament, and I’m sure he will do that,” Mr. Cameron said during a visit to an auto plant in the British Midlands. “And clearly News International has got some big issues to deal with and a mess to clear up. That has to be done by the management of that company. In the end, the management of the company must be an issue for the shareholders of that company, but the government wants to see this sorted out.”

In a week of fast-moving developments, James Murdoch testified that he had not been aware in 2008 of evidence that phone hacking at The News of the World went beyond a single “rogue reporter,” as the company then maintained. A year earlier, a reporter covering the royal family for the paper, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator on contract to the paper were convicted of hacking into the voice mail accounts of members of the royal household.

But on Thursday, two executives — Colin Myler, a former editor of The News of the World, and Tom Crone, the company’s former legal manager — said that James Murdoch’s testimony was “mistaken” and that they had in fact shown him evidence of wider phone hacking. Mr. Murdoch immediately denied the assertion, a stance he repeated Friday in an open letter to the chairman of the parliamentary panel.

“Allegations have been made as to the veracity of my testimony to your committee on Tuesday,” he said. “As you know, I was questioned thoroughly and I answered truthfully. I stand by my testimony.”

Mr. Watson, the Labour lawmaker, said the police should look into Mr. Crone’s and Mr. Myler’s assertions. “If their version of events is accurate,” he told the BBC, “it doesn’t just mean that Parliament has been misled, it means the police have another investigation on their hands.”

The British authority that regulates lawyers said Friday that it would formally investigate the role played by lawyers in the hacking scandal. Without naming specific firms, the Solicitors Regulation Authority said it would specifically investigate concerns raised by Mr. Watson.

He asked the authority to review Harbottle Lewis, a law firm that counts members of the royal family among its clients. Rupert Murdoch has accused the firm of making a “major mistake” in its review of internal News of the World e-mails, some of which, it has since emerged, contain evidence of wrongdoing.

The firm was hired by The News of the World in 2007 to defend it in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by the royalty reporter, Mr. Goodman, who claimed he should not have been fired because other staff members had done similar things.

Harbottle Lewis was asked to look through about 2,500 e-mails to and from Mr. Goodman, according to News International officials. In a carefully worded May 29, 2007, letter to the company, Lawrence Abramson of the law firm said that the review of e-mails found no evidence that executives knew about hacking. Several company executives have since said that the e-mail did contain signs of other unethical practices, notably police payoffs.

Lord Ken Macdonald, a former director of public prosecutions who was hired by News International to help it re-examine the e-mail, has said that the signs of criminality were “blindingly obvious” after a review of just “three to five minutes.”

Harbottle Lewis, which has been given a release from client confidentiality requirements to answer some questions put by the police and Parliament, did not return a call requesting comment.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/23/world/europe/23murdoch.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: james murdoch, nonexecutive directors, phone hacking

Murdoch Testimony on Hacking Comes Under New Scrutiny

July 22, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The pressure on Mr. Murdoch built a day after two former executives of News International — the British subsidiary of the News Corporation — publicly contradicted evidence he gave on Tuesday to a parliamentary panel seeking to untangle the story of phone hacking at the now defunct Murdoch tabloid The News of the World.

“Clearly James Murdoch has got questions to answer in Parliament, and I’m sure he will do that,” Mr. Cameron said during a visit to an auto plant in the British Midlands. “And clearly News International has got some big issues to deal with and a mess to clear up. That has to be done by the management of that company. In the end the management of the company must be an issue for the shareholders of that company, but the government wants to see this sorted out.”

The two former executives said on Thursday that they told Mr. Murdoch in 2008 of evidence suggesting that phone hacking at one of the company’s tabloid newspapers was more widespread. They said they informed Mr. Murdoch at the time that he was authorizing an unusually large secret settlement of a lawsuit brought by a hacking victim.

Mr. Murdoch, who runs the News Corporation’s European and Asian operations, including News International, told the committee on Tuesday that he agreed to pay £725,000, which was then about $1.4 million, in the case because it made financial sense. He testified that he was not aware at the time of the evidence, which probably would have become public had the case proceeded and undermined the company’s assertion that hacking was limited to “a lone rogue reporter.”

But Colin Myler, former editor of The News of the World, and Tom Crone, former News International legal manager, said Mr. Murdoch was “mistaken” in his testimony to the parliamentary panel. They said that when settling the lawsuit brought by a soccer union leader, Gordon Taylor, Mr. Murdoch knew about a crucial piece of evidence that had been turned over to the company: an e-mail marked “for Neville” containing the transcript of a hacked cellphone message, apparently a reference to the paper’s chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck.

“In fact, we did inform him of the ‘for Neville’ e-mail which had been produced to us by Gordon Taylor’s lawyers,” Mr. Myler and Mr. Crone said in the statement released Thursday night. On Friday, Tom Watson, an opposition Labour lawmaker who has been prominent in the hacking inquiries and is a member of the parliamentary committee, told the BBC that he would “formally” ask the police to investigate the executives’ assertions.

“This is the most significant moment of two years of investigation into phone hacking,” Mr. Watson said.

Referring to the executives’ account, he said on BBC television: “If their version of events is accurate, it doesn’t just mean that Parliament has been misled, it means the police have another investigation on their hands.”

He added: “There is only going to be one person who is accurate. Either James Murdoch, who to be fair to him is standing by his version of events, or Colin Myler and Tom Crone.”

Separately, Chris Bryant, another Labour lawmaker, who says his own phone was hacked, said he had written to nonexecutive directors of the News Corporation urging that James Murdoch and his father, Rupert, be suspended from their roles in running the company.

He said the company had displayed a “complete failure to tackle the original criminality” while “the lackadaisical approach to such matters would suggest that there is no proper corporate governance within the company.”

The circumstances surrounding the settlement of the Taylor case are a focus of the parliamentary inquiry because they could shed light on whether there was an effort by News International to obscure the extent of the hacking. It was the first lawsuit brought by a hacking victim, and it came while the company, which owned the tabloid, was reeling from the 2007 guilty pleas of Clive Goodman, the paper’s royal reporter, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator, for hacking the phones of the royal household.

Ravi Somaiya and Graham Bowley contributed reporting from London, and Alan Cowell from Paris

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/23/world/europe/23murdoch.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: auto plant, including news, phone hacking

British Leader Defends His Actions in Hacking Case

July 20, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Mr. Cameron’s appearance before a special sitting of the House of Commons offered one more remarkable moment of passion and spectacle, following the separate appearance of Rupert Murdoch and his son James before lawmakers on Tuesday for nearly three hours of questioning of one of the world’s most powerful media moguls by British legislators.

Their appearance — made yet more dramatic by a protester’s attack on Rupert Murdoch with a plate of shaving cream — did not seem on Wednesday to have come close to answering many of the questions the father and son faced about phone hacking in the British outpost of their media empire in 2002.

Indeed, one of the two parliamentary panels investigating the widening scandal released a scathing report on Wednesday accusing Murdoch companies of “deliberate attempts” to thwart its investigations, and said police inquiries had been a “catalog of failures” to investigate the issue.

The events played out against a backdrop of huge public revulsion over the central allegation that The News of the World, a now-defunct tabloid closed down by Mr. Murdoch earlier this month, ordered a private investigator to hack the voice mail of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old girl abducted and murdered in 2002. So great is the interest in the affair that the BBC devoted live television coverage on Wednesday to what it said was the Murdochs’ executive jet flying out of Luton airport north of London. Its destination was not announced.

The gathering of so many emotive issues, laced with big money deals, tabloid scandal and long-running British suspicion of the Murdoch machine, has crystallized into the most serious crisis of credibility and confidence of Mr. Cameron’s 15 months in office — a crisis in which he seemed to be trying on Wednesday to regain some of the initiative seized earlier by the Labour opposition leader, Ed Miliband.

Mr. Cameron returned home early from an African trade tour late Tuesday to face questions about his relationships with former senior figures at News International, the British subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s global News Corporation, particularly his choice of a former Murdoch employee, Andy Coulson, as his director of communications.

Mr. Coulson, a former editor of The News of the World tabloid, resigned from the prime minister’s office in January and was among 10 people who were arrested in the affair.

Referring to his decision to hire Mr. Coulson, Mr. Cameron said, “I regret and I am extremely sorry about the furor it has caused.”

“With 20-20 hindsight and all that has followed,” he said, “I would not have offered him the job and I expect that he wouldn’t have taken it. But you don’t make decisions in hindsight, you make them in the present. You live and you learn and, believe you me, I have learned.” He added that Mr. Coulson had been properly vetted before joining his staff and had given “assurances” that he had not been involved in phone hacking.

It was the closest Mr. Cameron has come to an apology, and seemed to show that the prime minister was distancing himself from his former aide.

But Mr. Cameron continued to defend Mr. Coulson’s work as director of communications and said he had “an old-fashioned view about innocence until proven guilty.” If it is proved that Mr. Coulson lied to him, he said, “that will be the moment for a profound apology.”

“It was my decision” to hire Mr. Coulson, Mr. Cameron said, “and I take responsibility.”

Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour opposition, responded by saying Mr. Cameron’s position had been compromised by his association with Mr. Coulson. “Why doesn’t he do more than give a half-apology?” Mr. Miliband asked.

Referring to Mr. Cameron, Mr. Miliband said: “He says in hindsight he made a mistake by hiring Mr. Coulson. He says if Mr. Coulson lied to him, he would apologize. That isn’t good enough. It’s not about hindsight, it’s not about whether Mr. Coulson lied to him. It’s about all the information and warnings the prime minister ignored. He was warned and he preferred to ignore the warnings.”

Mr. Cameron was questioned repeatedly about a New York Times investigation into The News of the World that was published in September 2010.

“There was no information in The New York Times September 2010 article to make me change my mind about Mr. Coulson,” Mr. Cameron said.

The article found that hacking was widespread, and quoted two former News of the World journalists as saying that phone hacking was discussed in Mr. Coulson’s presence.

Jo Becker contributed reporting.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=bdfe840ed7b92910c39e5d7d30c9f3e6

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: media empire, phone hacking, rupert murdoch

Murdochs Say Top Executives Didn’t Know of Phone Hacking

July 19, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

It was not clear whether their responses would satisfy skeptical lawmakers, who tried for nearly three hours to discover the extent of the Murdochs’ knowledge of events at the heart of the scandal. It exploded two weeks ago with the news that people working for The News of the World, a tabloid run by the Murdoch empire’s British arm, News International, had broken into the voice mail of a 13-year-old girl, Milly Dowler, who had been abducted in 2002 and was later found murdered. The firestorm at followed brought Mr. Murdoch down from the heights of influence here to what he called “the most humble day of my life.”

Adding to the drama, a protester disrupted the hearing by attempting to hit Rupert Murdoch with a paper plate full of white foam. Mr. Murdoch appeared unhurt, and the hearing resumed after a 15-minute break.

The disruption happened near the end of nearly three hours of sustained questioning by British lawmakers over the phone hacking scandal, which has raised questions about the behavior of the police, politicians and the media elite in the worst crisis to confront Prime Minister David Cameron.

Mr. Murdoch, who is 80, appeared at the hearing with his 38-year-old son, James, sitting side by side facing their questioners without lawyers at their elbow. Each wore a dark suit, white shirt and tie, though Rupert Murdoch removed his jacket after the foam incident and finished his testimony in shirtsleeves.

After the Murdochs, the committee heard testimony from Rebekah Brooks, who resigned as head of News International last Friday and was arrested and questioned by police on Sunday.

Ms. Brooks, a former editor of the News of the World, insisted that the Murdoch company acted “quickly and decisively” against phone hacking once it had seen new evidence of the extent of the practice in December 2010. She told the committee that while she was editor she employed private investigators, but only for legitimate inquiries, not for hacking and other illicit methods, and she denied paying police officers for information.

At a hearing of the same committee in 2003, Ms. Brooks said her newspaper had paid the police for information — a comment she later retracted.

In a separate development, the BBC reported the existence of previously undisclosed indirect links between figures under investigation in the scandal and Prime Minister Cameron, who has been criticized by the opposition for hiring a former editor of The News of the World, Andy Coulson, as his head of communications.

In a new disclosure that threatened to bring the scandal closer to Mr. Cameron, the BBC said that, in the run-up to last year’s elections, Mr. Coulson sought advice from another former News of the World executive, Neil Wallis, who has since been arrested in connection with the phone hacking investigation and had worked for Scotland Yard after he left The News of the World.

The Murdochs spent much of their time before the committee, both before and after the disruption, insisting that while they were deeply sorry over the revelations of widespread unethical practices at their British newspapers, they knew little or nothing about them and had not tried to cover them up. Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, the parent company of the empire, hit those themes again in a prepared statement, originally intended to open the hearing, that the committee allowed him to read aloud at the conclusion of his appearance.

The disruption came after the Murdochs had been in the hearing room more than two hours. A young man in a checked shirt rushed up to Rupert Murdoch, holding a paper plate full of foam that was thwarted by Wendi Deng, 42, Mr. Murdoch’s wife, who hurtled herself toward the attacker from her seat behind her husband and appeared to strike the man with the palm of her right hand. Within moments, the man was removed from the committee room by police officers who arrested him, his face covered in foam. His identity or motive was not immediately known.

“Why didn’t you see what was happening?” James Murdoch was heard asking the police, British news reports said.

Shortly after the session resumed, Rupert Murdoch was asked by Louise Mensch, a Conservative lawmaker, if he had ever considered resigning.

“No,” he said.

Why not? “Because I feel that people that I trusted let me down, I think that they behaved disgracefully,” he said. “Frankly, I am the best person to clean this up.”

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/world/europe/20hacking.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: media elite, mr murdoch, phone hacking

Murdochs Now Say They Will Appear Before Parliament

July 14, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Earlier in the day, the Murdochs had sent letters to the panel, the Commons Culture Select Committee, refusing an invitation to appear.

The panel responded by escalating the issue, formally summoning them to testify. The panel said it had “made clear its view that all three should appear to account for the behavior of News International and for previous statements made to the committee in Parliament, now acknowledged to be false.”

Mr. Murdoch and his son agreed to testify shortly after the summonses were issued, putting off the question of whether, as American citizens, they could have been compelled to do so. Ms. Brooks, who is a British subject, said in a separate letter earlier Thursday that she would appear before the panel next Tuesday, though she warned that she might not be able to answer detailed questions.

The moves in Parliament coincided with an announcement by Scotland Yard that officers had arrested Neil Wallis, 60, a former editor of The News of the World, the Murdoch-owned tabloid at the heart of the phone hacking scandal. The crisis for Rupert Murdoch erupted early last week with news reports that The News of the World had ordered its investigators to break into the voice mail of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old who had been abducted and was later found murdered. The Murdoch family shut down the 168-year-old Sunday newspaper after a final edition last weekend.

Rupert Murdoch said early Thursday that he was prepared to appear before a separate inquiry, led by a judge, that was announced by Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday. “Having done this, I would be happy to discuss with you how best to give evidence to your committee,” Mr. Murdoch said in a letter released by the committee.

By agreeing to testify, the Murdochs avoided possible parliamentary repercussions. Sir George Young, the leader of the House of Commons, said lawmakers could impose penalties — including imprisonment — if it ruled that people who refuse to testify were deemed to be in contempt of Parliament. But such measures had “not been used for some time,” he said.

“If a witness fails to attend when summoned, the committee reports the matter to the House, and it’s then for the House to decide what further action to take,” he told Parliament, referring to the House of Commons. “There hasn’t been a case of that kind for some considerable time. The House can order a witness to attend a committee. Apparently this hasn’t happened since 1920.”

Parliament’s summer recess is set to begin next Tuesday, and lawmakers would not normally return until Sept. 5.

Separately, the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an investigation on Thursday into allegations that News Corporation journalists hacked into the phones of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, according to people briefed on the matter. They said the investigation was prompted by news coverage of the hacking scandal and by requests from American politicians.

The developments came after a day of high drama on Wednesday. Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation stunned the British political establishment by abandoning — at least for now — its $12 billion bid to acquire the shares of British Sky Broadcasting, Britain’s leading satellite television operator, that it did not already own.

The deal was subject to regulatory review over, among other issues, News Corporation’s integrity. Politicians continued to press on Thursday for Mr. Murdoch to answer what Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg called “big questions” about his companies’ fitness to own British media outlets, which still include The Times of London, The Sunday Times and the top-selling Sun tabloid.

Pressure seemed to be mounting in particular on Ms. Brooks, the chief executive of News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of the News Corporation, who was editor of The News of the World at the time of the hacking. A separate lawsuit was filed this week alleging that phone a second episode of hacking took place while she was editor of The News of the World, as she was when a private investigator working for the newspaper allegedly helped journalists hack into the phone of Milly Dowler. Ms. Brooks has issued an apology to the Dowler family but said she was on vacation when the resulting article ran, and knew nothing about the hacking.

Sarah Lyall reported from London, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Jo Becker and John F. Burns contributed reporting from London.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/world/europe/15hacking.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: phone hacking, scotland yard, summonses

Cozy Ties Mark Newspaper’s Dealings With Scotland Yard

July 11, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Detective Cook said the police had evidence that one of The News of the World’s senior editors, Alex Marunchak, had ordered the illegal surveillance as a favor to two suspects in the case: Sid Fillery and Jonathan Rees, private investigators whose firm had done work for the paper. The lawyer for Mr. Cook, Mark Lewis, said in an interview that the detective believed that Mr. Fillery and Mr. Rees were seeking help in gathering evidence about Detective Cook to derail the murder inquiry.

What happened at the meeting, a less detailed account of which appeared in The Guardian, provides a window into the extraordinary coziness that long existed between the British police and The News of The World, as well as the relationship between the paper and unsavory characters in the criminal world.

None of the parties to this alliance have escaped the stain. The paper, at the center of a widening scandal over phone hacking and corruption, was shut last week by News International, its parent company, in an effort to limit the already extensive damage done to the reputation and business interests of Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corporation.

Scotland Yard has admitted that it accepted News International’s explanation that the hacking was the work of one rogue reporter, and that some police officers had accepted substantial payments in exchange for confidential information.

The News of the World remains the target of several criminal investigations. A number of its former editors and reporters have been arrested, including Andy Coulson, who most recently worked as the chief spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron, but no one has yet been formally charged. And Mr. Cameron has announced he will appoint a judge to examine both the tabloid’s hacking and its close relationship with the police.

Also present for the meeting that day in 2003, said a spokesman for Scotland Yard, were Cmdr. Andy Baker, who was Detective Cook’s boss, and Dick Fedorcio, Scotland Yard’s chief public relations officer. According to an account that Detective Cook provided to Mr. Lewis and others, Ms. Wade excused the surveillance by saying that the paper’s action had been “in the public interest” — the argument British newspapers typically make to justify using underhanded or illegal methods to, say, expose affairs by public officials.

Ms. Wade said that the paper was tailing Detective Cook because it suspected him of having an affair with Jackie Haines, host of the Crimewatch television program on which he had recently appeared. In fact, the two were married to each other, as had been mentioned prominently in an article about them in the popular gossip magazine “Hello!”

Scotland Yard seems to have been satisfied with the explanation of Ms. Wade, now Rebekah Brooks and the chief executive of News International. Her paper’s editors and reporters had a long history with the police — paying for tips and sometimes even serving as quasi-police investigators themselves, in return for confidential information (many News of the World stories about criminal matters used to include a reference to the paper’s handing “a dossier” of its findings to Scotland Yard).

It is the closeness between the paper and the police that, it seems, led Scotland Yard to what officials have retrospectively admitted was a major misstep: the decision not to pursue the initial phone-hacking investigation adequately in 2006 and again in 2009. It was in 2006 that members of the royal household notified the police that they believed their cellphone messages were being intercepted by The News of the World.

The subsequent police “raid” at the paper consisted of rummaging through a single reporter’s desk and failing to question any other reporters or editors. Two people were subsequently jailed: Clive Goodman, The News of the World’s royal reporter, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator hired by the paper. Even when The Guardian reported that the hacking had extended far beyond the pair, and that thousands of victims might be involved, the police and the newspaper insisted repeatedly that the wrongdoing had been limited to a single “rogue” reporter.

This weekend, Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who was in charge of the initial inquiry and who in 2009 declined to reopen it, said that the police response had been inadequate. “I have regrettably said the initial inquiry was a success,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “Clearly, now it looks very different.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=014f67e3dc9823c4699a7f97cc01a990

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: andy coulson, news corporation, phone hacking

Four Phone-Hacking Cases to Be Tests for Further Claims, Judge Says

April 17, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

“Otherwise we will be going on forever,” said the judge, Geoffrey Vos. “Some people may want to, but I don’t.” Judge Vos added that he wanted to “achieve a resolution of all these cases in the shortest possible time at the minimum possible cost.”

He said he would decide later which cases to bring forward, but that he was inclined to proceed with those brought by the actress Sienna Miller; the designer Kelly Hoppen; Andy Gray, a television sports commentator; and Skylet Andrew, a sports agent. Those cases have advanced further than some others, he said, and represent a range of issues and possible levels of damage.

Judge Vos made his remarks at a hearing intended to bring some order to the mushrooming civil actions proceeding against the News of the World. Last week, the newspaper admitted to illegally intercepting the voice-mail messages of eight public figures in the mid-2000’s. It apologized and offered to pay compensation.

At the hearing on Friday, it emerged that the paper had offered one of the victims, Ms. Miller, about $163,000 in damages, and given her a deadline of 21 days to consider the offer. Her lawyer, Hugh Tomlinson, said she had not yet decided what to do.

At least 12 other people have begun cases against the newspaper, and at the hearing a lawyer for the Metropolitan Police said that officers had discovered at least 91 possible victims, and potentially many more.

The courtroom was crammed with lawyers: for phone-hacking victims like Ms. Miller and Mr. Andrew; for the News of the World’s parent company, News Group Newspapers; for the police department, which has assigned 40 officers to the criminal case; and for Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator hired in the mid-2000s by News of the World.

Along with the News of the World’s royalty reporter, Clive Goodman, Mr. Mulcaire was jailed in 2007 for hacking into the phones of aides to members of the royal family. Information found in his notebooks, which have been seized by the police, has led in the past few weeks to the detention and questioning of three senior News of the World journalists on suspicion of engaging in phone hacking.

At the hearing, Mr. Mulcaire’s lawyer, Alexandra Marzec, said he wanted to protect himself against possible criminal charges and was admitting to nothing.

“The admissions which have been made by News Group in the past week are made solely on behalf of News Group, and Mr. Mulcaire does not admit doing anything, and does not associate himself with these admissions,” Ms. Marzec said.

The police said that they were currently going through 9,200 pages of material seized from Mr. Mulcaire.

Meanwhile, in a separate but related case, the police said they were considering opening an investigation into whether journalists had paid police officers for information. The move stems from remarks made in 2003 by Rebekah Brooks, a former News of the World editor and now the chief executive of News International, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and is News Group’s parent company.

Mrs. Brooks told the culture and media committee at the time that “we have paid the police for information in the past.” Asked this week about the remark, Mrs. Brooks said in a letter to a different parliamentary group, the home affairs committee, that she had been speaking generally.

“I was responding to a specific line of questioning on how newspapers get information,” she wrote. “My intention was simply to comment on the widely held belief that payments had been made in the past to police officers. If, in doing so, I gave the impression that I had knowledge of any specific cases, I can assure you that this was not my intention.”

In a letter to the home affairs committee, Assistant Police Commissioner Cressida Dick said that a senior officer had been assigned “to conduct a scoping exercise to establish whether there are now any grounds for beginning a criminal investigation resulting from the comments made by Rebekah Brooks” in 2003.

A spokeswoman for News International said the company had no comment.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/world/europe/16hacking.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: civil actions, news group, phone hacking