It looks like Rupert's recent spate of threatening tweets are not working out like he planned. Breaking from The Independent:
A payment to a British police force by a News Corp company accused of using piracy to crack a rival pay-TV service could be studied by US authorities investigating whether Rupert Murdoch's conglomerate broke America's strict anti-corruption laws, a former US Department of Justice lawyer claimed yesterday.
As revealed in yesterday's Independent, Surrey Police confirmed it had received £2,000 from the Surrey-based technology company NDS in 2000 for use "in the fight against organised crime". NDS said the payment ordered by its security chief Len Withall – a former Detective Chief Inspector at Surrey Police – following "some work", was a "one-off charitable donation" and produced an acknowledgement letter.
Bradley Simon, a former lawyer at the US Department of Justice, was reported as saying that the US authorities would be interested in the payment: "The DoJ is focused on payments to officials. The DoJ feels a lot of pressure to make cases when there is a lot of scrutiny."
http://www.independent.co.uk/...
This is a very big deal, because the scope of these alleged crimes Down Under could dwarf that of the hacking and bribery claims thus far in the UK. Brit, a.k.a Peter Jukes recently conveyed to me in an email that an Australian journalist he's been speaking to believes these new Aussie crimes "could easily outstrip anything so far in the News Corp saga".
In other, but related FOTHOM news, Brit also has a devastating article up on The Daily Beast about Rupert Murdoch's recent tweets, titled:
Will Twitter Destroy Murdoch?
excerpt:
Rupert Murdoch’s Twitter Account Has Made the Mogul a Figure of Fun
by Peter Jukes Mar 29, 2012 5:40 PM EDT
Having recently discovered Twitter, the News Corp. mogul is sounding a lot like a social-media King Lear—but the real danger, for him, is that we may learn not to fear him.
There’s always been something quite Shakespearean about Rupert Murdoch, his media empire and his dynastic family story. Indeed, when the hacking scandal first broke last summer there was an entire #shakespeare4murdoch hashtag that trended highly for several days on twitter. But the tweet tirades of last night, railing at other news outlets for publicizing allegations of pay TV piracy in his empire, sound more like King Lear raging on the heath (“I shall do such things, I know not yet what they are, but they shall be the terror of the earth!”).
Read the whole article here:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/...
And here is the latest illustration by me for Peter's book, THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF MURDOCH:
If you can, please support the book here:
http://unbound.co.uk/...
UPDATE x1: BREAKING: Down goes another Met Chief! – ahead of damning report into how he hired Murdoch executive
approx 11:25 pm Eastern US Time from The Independent:
The once-powerful head of communications at Scotland Yard resigned yesterday, meaning he will avoid facing a disciplinary hearing over the award of a lucrative short-term contract to a former News of the World executive.
Dick Fedorcio, who charted Scotland Yard's public response to its major crises since 1997, left after the force decided last week that he should face gross misconduct charges over his dealings with Neil Wallis, the now-defunct tabloid's former deputy editor.
Mr Fedorcio had been on extended leave since August during a police watchdog inquiry into a £24,000 contract agreed between the Metropolitan Police and Mr Wallis's company, Chamy Media, for public relations advice between October 2009 and September 2010. Mr Wallis was hired shortly after news broke that phone hacking at the Sunday tabloid had left a trail of victims and after he had assured the force that it would not be embarrassed by further revelations, according to evidence given to the Leveson Inquiry on press standards.
http://www.independent.co.uk/...
(animated gif ironically provided by News Corp.'s Photobucket.com)
UPDATE 1.5: I just found this very helpful summary of the recent Australian document-dump story:
US broadcaster PBS, British broadcaster BBC and the Fairfax-owned The Australian Financial Review have each aired damning investigations into the Murdoch media conglomerate, focusing, in Britain and Australia, on claims that while attempting to maintain security, then News Corp subsidiary NDS ended up encouraging the work of hackers, which led to a spike in piracy. The ''pirates'' allegedly cracked the codes of smartcards issued to customers of pay TV services. The hackers would then sell blackmarket codes, giving people free viewing and costing pay TV companies millions of dollars in potential revenue.
Whatever the truth in the claims and counter-claims, the problem eating away at the Murdoch empire is its potential impact on a British regulator's investigation into whether News should continue to own its £4.5 billion ($A6.9 billion) stake in its pay TV arm BSkyB.
http://www.hardenexpress.com.au/...