LONDON — The long-running tabloid newspaper scandal that has shaken Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire appeared on Tuesday to have reached into the heart of Prime Minister David Cameron’s government, with evidence at a judicial inquiry suggesting that a senior cabinet minister, or at least an aide claiming to speak for him, worked covertly to help win approval for a $12-billion takeover of the BSkyB network, a deal that would have crowned Mr. Murdoch’s 60-year media career.
The disclosures pointing to a hand-in-glove collaboration between Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation and Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt came in a sheaf of e-mails that the inquiry subpoenaed from a Murdoch lobbyist. The lobbyist was pushing for government approval of a News Corporation takeover of the 59 percent stake that that it did not already own in BSkyB, Britain’s leading satellite TV network, a generator of billion-dollar annual profits, and, increasingly, a serious competitor to the BBC.
During the period covered by the e-mails, Mr. Hunt was assigned by Mr. Cameron to take over quasi-judicial powers to approve the takeover. The deal, though, was vehemently opposed by many competing media organizations in Britain and by many others who argued that Mr. Murdoch, with control of publications that had 40 percent of Britain’s total newspaper circulation, already had a degree of influence and power, particularly over politicians, that was unhealthy for Britain, its political system and its market economy.
The e-mails tracked an intense back-and-forth between Frédéric Michel, News Corporation’s chief lobbyist in Britain, and Adam Smith, a political aide in Mr. Hunt’s office. Mr. Smith’s e-mails depict Mr. Hunt as an avid supporter of the BSkyB takeover and ready, in effect, to manipulate the approval process in the Murdochs’ favor, in part by giving Mr. Michel — and through him, James Murdoch — advance notice of government moves affecting the bid.
In one of the messages, the Hunt aide told Mr. Michel that he had “managed to get some info” on what Mr. Hunt would say about the bid in Parliament the next day, adding, in brackets, “although absolutely illegal!” James Murdoch, Mr. Murdoch’s 39-year-old son and until recently the head of the family’s media interests in Britain, responded to questions about the message, which had been forwarded to him, with what appeared to be a weary impatience. “I thought it was a joke,” he said, adding that the use of an exclamation point confirmed it. “It’s a wink, a joke,” he said.
Other e-mails in the same chain had Mr. Smith, the Hunt aide, assuring the News Corporation lobbyist that Mr. Hunt was “keen to get to the same objective” as the Murdochs — approval of the takeover bid — but needed “political cover.”
The 161 pages of e-mail messages were provided to the public inquiry by Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper business, News International, following a legal order issued by the inquiry. The e-mails were worded, mostly, in a familiar tone, as between two confidants, and ran on one occasion to the disclosure that Mr. Hunt and Mr. Smith were just about to head out to a London performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.”
Government spokesmen immediately suggested that the bantering tone of the e-mails, both Mr. Smith’s and Mr. Michel’s, as they were forwarded to James Murdoch, could have reflected the desire of the aide and the lobbyist to inflate their influence in the affair, and were not necessarily an accurate reflection of Mr. Hunt’s approach.
In a statement, Mr. Hunt described the reaction to the evidence that emerged during Mr. Murdoch’s testimony as “kneejerk” and said “some of the evidence reported meetings and conversations that simply didn’t happen.” He added that he had asked the judge in charge of the inquiry, Brian Leveson, to move up his scheduled appearance so he could show that he had “conducted this process with scrupulous fairness.”
The inquiry testimony was the headline-grabbing centerpiece of a day when James Murdoch spent more than five hours on the witness stand accounting for his role in the scandal during the five years he headed the Murdoch media interests in Britain, a position he has now abandoned, along with expectations that he would eventually succeed his 81-year-old father at the head of the $50-billion, News Corporation conglomerate, which is based in New York. Rupert Murdoch will take the stand at the inquiry on Wednesday and is likely to face a grilling that will be heightened by the new uproar over the BSkyB bid.
As the e-mails were read out, James Murdoch maintained the same seemingly confident, unflustered demeanor he had displayed through hours of relentless questioning by the inquiry’s chief counsel on his failure to act sooner to clean up the phone-hacking abuses at the two Murdoch-owned tabloids that until now have been the main focus of public, police and political attention in Britain. Over and over again, he insisted that the e-mail exchanges, at least on the part of News Corporation, amounted to a normal part of “active public affairs engagement” by a company involved in a major takeover bid.
When a lawyer for the inquiry, Robert Jay, suggested that James Murdoch appeared to be “somewhat blind to what would appear to the rest of us, that there was a quid-pro-quo” in the Cameron government pushing for approval of the BSkyB bid after riding to a 2010 election victory on the basis of the backing of the Murdoch newspapers, Mr. Murdoch replied firmly, “I simply wouldn’t make that trade, I don’t do business that way, and it would be entirely inappropriate to do so.”
The new furor spread quickly to Parliament, with the deputy leader of the opposition Labor Party, Harriet Harman, demanding that Mr. Hunt, a 45-year-old, Oxford-educated former public relations entrepreneur, come immediately to the House of Commons with an apology, an acknowledgment that his behavior had fallen “woefully short” of that expected of a cabinet minister and his resignation.
But Mr. Hunt said in a statement he would not resign and would give his version of his contacts with News Corporation in his own testimony at the inquiry. He was backed in his refusal to step down by Mr. Cameron, who issued a statement from 10 Downing Street saying that Mr. Hunt had his “full confidence,” and, renewing his own long-standing defense of his ties to the Murdochs, averring that he had no “inappropriate conversations” with James Murdoch and had “done nothing wrong” in connection with the BSkyB bid.
The BSkyB takeover bid was already a casualty of the scandal that has enveloped the revelations of widespread phone-hacking, illicit payments to police officers, and other wrongdoing at the two market-leading Murdoch tabloids in Britain, the now-defunct News of the World and the daily Sun. Mr. Murdoch ordered the bid withdrawn precipitously last summer, under urging from Prime Minister Cameron and other political leaders, after police revealed that The News of the World had hacked the mobile telephone of a 13-year-old London-area schoolgirl, Millie Dowler, after she was abducted and before she was found murdered.
Mr. Cameron has struggled to distance himself from the scandal amid a welter of disclosures about the frequent meetings he held before and after taking office two years ago with Rupert and James Murdoch, then head of the family’s business in Britain. But until Tuesday’s revelations at the inquiry Mr. Cameron appointed last year, headed by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, the government had succeeded in holding off critics’ accusations that the Murdochs had bought influence with Mr. Cameron’s Conservatives by switching their British newspapers’ backing from the Labor Party to the Conservatives ahead of the May 2010 election, effectively assuring Conservative support for the BSkyB bid.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment