@BumbleBeeBoogie,
James Murdoch Denies Misleading Parliamentary Panel
Associated Press
By ALAN COWELL and SARAH LYALL
November 10, 2011
LONDON — James Murdoch, News Corporation’s deputy chief operating officer and the younger son of its chairman, Rupert Murdoch, testified for a second time on Thursday before a British parliamentary inquiry into the phone hacking affair convulsing his company, maintaining his calm as he firmly denied misleading the panel at his earlier appearance in July. Instead, he blamed former underlings for providing the committee with testimony that was “not right.”
Wearing a blue suit and sporting the red lapel poppy that many Britons wear for an annual commemoration of those who have fallen in battle, Mr. Murdoch seemed combative and self-assured, repeatedly denying during the two-and-a-half hour interrogation that he had received evidence of “wider spread phone hacking” at a crucial meeting in 2008.
“No, I did not,” Mr. Murdoch replied after a committee member asked him if he had, in fact, given misleading testimony about what he knew and when he knew it.
He did appear to alter one aspect of his account, acknowledging that he was made aware in 2008 of a damning e-mail that contained evidence that phone hacking was more widespread at one of the company’s newspapers, The News of the World, than he has publicly acknowledged. But he insisted that its exact nature had not been made clear to him.
Rather, he accused two former executives of News International, the British media subsidiary of News Corporation of giving the committee “inconsistent” testimony when they contradicted his July testimony, saying that they had provided him with the e-mail. .
“Certainly in the evidence they gave to you in 2011 in regard to my own knowledge, I believe it was inconsistent and not right, and I dispute it vigorously,” Mr. Murdoch said. “I believe their testimony was misleading, and I dispute it.”
At one point, a committee member, Tom Watson, compared the Murdoch media empire to a mafia family bound together by a vow of silence — omertà.
Mr. Murdoch responded with a pained expression. “Mr. Watson. Please. I don’t think that’s appropriate,” he said.
“You must be the first Mafia boss in history who didn’t know he was running a criminal enterprise,” Mr. Watson snapped back.
Mr. Murdoch was a similarly deft witness in July when he appeared before the parliamentary committee investigating the phone hacking scandal that was riveting the country. Sitting alongside his 80-year-old father then, along with family members and legal representatives, he deflected lawmakers’ questions, maintaining that he had learned only recently how widespread the hacking problem really was.
On Thursday, he returned alone to Parliament to face much more skeptical questioning from the panel. But his calm did not crack as he defended himself against mounting evidence that he and top executives at News International knew three years ago that hacking was not limited to a single rogue reporter jailed a year earlier, but was pervasive at The News of the World, a Sunday tabloid that the company shut down in July.
As the hearing began on Thursday and Mr. Murdoch was invited to revisit his earlier testimony, he asked to comment about his father’s remark in the July hearing that he had been humbled by the affair. “I think the whole company is humbled,” he said, adding he was “very sorry” and adding that he wanted to ensure that such events “do not happen again.”
Much was riding on how Mr. Murdoch, 38, handled the lawmakers’ questioning, including his personal credibility and the health of the News Corporation media empire. The hacking scandal has tarnished the corporation, rocked its stock price, scuttled its $12 billion bid to take over the satellite giant British Sky Broadcasting, and added to strains between Mr. Murdoch and his father. At least 16 former employees of The News of the World have been arrested, and a series of executives up the corporate ladder — including the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and chief executive of Dow Jones, Les Hinton — have resigned.
His testimony certain did no damage to News Corporation’s share price, which rose 1.4 percent in trading in the United States, to $17.19, up from its Aug. 8 low of $14.01, as the scandal was at a peak.
The hearings have a role beyond the fate of Mr. Murdoch and that of his company. They are seeking to get to the bottom of to a scandal that has reached deep into British society, raising questions of intimate and self-serving ties linking the media, the political elite and the police.
The panel came to the hearing armed with recently released News of the World documents related to a case central to the doubts about Mr. Murdoch’s earlier testimony: that of Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association. In 2008, after Mr. Taylor claimed that his voice mail messages had been repeatedly hacked by the tabloid, Mr. Murdoch authorized News International to pay him more than £450,000 ($725,000) and legal fees exceeding $322,000.
In his July testimony, Mr. Murdoch maintained that the episode had done nothing to alter his understanding that a single reporter, Clive Goodman, the former royal reporter at The News of the World, had engaged in phone hacking in 2007.
On Thursday, he said that “no documents were shown to me or given to me” at a crucial meeting in 2008 with Colin Myler, who was editor of The News of the World at the time, and Tom Crone, who was its legal manager.
“The meeting, which I remember quite well, was a short meeting, and I was given at that meeting sufficient information to authorize the increase of the settlement offers that had been made” to Mr. Taylor, he said. “But I was given no more than that.”
In July, Mr. Murdoch had testified that he had been given an oral briefing on the Taylor case and “did not get involved directly” in the negotiations on the settlement. He denied that the payment was motivated by a desire to keep the matter from becoming public, saying that the aim instead was pragmatic, to avoid damages and legal costs from a judgment at trial. In that testimony, he declined to discuss releasing Mr. Taylor from the agreement’s confidentiality clause.
But after he testified, Mr. Myler and Mr. Crone contradicted Mr. Murdoch’s account, saying they had had direct conversations with him about evidence of broader hacking during the time the Taylor case was being handled.
They said Mr. Murdoch knew when settling the lawsuit about the e-mail with evidence of broader hacking, in the form of transcript of a hacked cellphone message, marked “For Neville,” 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 a statement after Mr. Murdoch’s July testimony.
The panel has seen a memo dated June 3, 2008, from a lawyer with News International’s counsel at the time, Farrer & Company, warning executives that there was “a powerful case that there is (or was) a culture of illegal information access” at the paper. The lawyer, Michael Silverleaf, also said there was “overwhelming evidence of the involvement of a number of senior journalists” in the paper’s attempts to illegally obtain information about Mr. Taylor.
