How Murdoch Reporters’ Bribes to British Cops Violate U.S. Law

[Ichingcarpenter]

Snip....


News International Limited, the British arm of the Murdoch empire, is a subsidiary of News Corp., a publicly traded American company which also owns the Wall Street Journal and Fox News (not to mention the Sunday Times of London, the Times of London, and the British tabloid the Sun). Because of this, experts say, News Corp. and all of its subsidiaries come under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a Watergate-era law which makes it a crime for U.S. companies to participate in bribery abroad.



snip


"A small number of officers may have taken illegal payments. That is fundamentally corrupt," Met Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson told the BBC. "If true, I will be determined to root them out, find them and put them in front of the criminal court."
After years of relative quiet, the United States has substantially stepped up the resources to prosecute companies for violating the bribery law. There are 150 open investigations of American companies, according to the law firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. In 2005, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice combined for a total of just 12 FCPA enforcement actions. By 2010 that number had jumped to 54, the law firm reports. We've written previously on this subject when it involved payments by Albert Jack Stanley, a former executive at KBR.


Unless information emerges that News Corp. executives in the United States were aware of and condoned illegal behavior, it is doubtful whether the company or individual executives would face criminal prosecution in the United States, several defense lawyers said.


A prominent academic, Michael Koehler, who tracks prosecutions on his blog the FCPA Professor, is not as sure the global news giant will escape criminal prosecution.

"Look at the 2011 enforcement actions on my blog," he says. "None of these involved high level officers or board members."
But lack of evidence of executive complicity in bribery doesn't protect the parent company from civil actions. Where News Corp. may be most vulnerable is under the "Books and Records" and "Internal Controls" provisions of the FCPA, according to lawyers who practice in this field.

snip






The statute of limitations on civil FCPA charges is five years. Reports about the illegal bribes seem to date back to 2006 so regulators would likely be mindful of the calendar. Companies are often rewarded for cooperating with the inquiries. "Raising a statute of limitations defense is not exactly cooperation mode,” says Koehler.


snip


News Corp also depends on the government for its broadcast licenses. Fox Television Stations Inc. has 269 active licenses with the Federal Communications Commission, according to the agency's website. An agency spokesman would not comment on whether FCPA violations might put those licenses in jeopardy as well.


http://www.propublica.org/article/how-murdoch-reporters-bribes-to-british-cops-violate-us-law



THE ARREST OF Rebekah Brooks,


She was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, contrary to Section1(1) Criminal Law Act 1977

and on suspicion of corruption allegations contrary to Section 1 of the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906.


The Operation Weeting team is conducting the new investigation into phone hacking. Operation Elveden is the investigation into allegations of inappropriate payments to police. This investigation is being supervised by the IPCC.

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[pscot]

2. Don't get your hopes up

The DOJ would have to get off it's ass and go after this. Since the Murdochs were'nt operating a marijuana dispensary, that's probably not gonna happen.

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. As I pointed out repeatedly THE US SENATE

can hold investigations and hearings


church investigations of the CIA and FBI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee


Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Sub...


A History of Notable Senate Investigations

http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/inve...

[malaise]

5. There's a great interview with Barbara Boxer

on BBC's Newsnight. I saw it this morning on BBC international.

[Ichingcarpenter]

6. See if you can post it on the DU video forum

or give a separate OP if you can't find a youtube of it.

[pscot]

7. Despite the obvious historical interest of your excellent links

We live in a brave new world where that kind of thing just doesn't seem to happen any more. Frank Church has been dead for a long time.

[Ichingcarpenter]

8. (Durbin) calls for Congress to investigate News Corp. phone hacking

Dem Leader(Durbin) calls for Congress to investigate News Corp. phone hacking

Source: The Hill

Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the second-ranking Senate Democrat, has called for congressional hearings and investigations of Ruport Murdoch’s media empire to determine whether it employed illegal practices in the U.S.

Durbin called for Congress to investigate the matter after British police arrested Rebekah Brooks Sunday morning in a widening probe of phone hacking and police payoffs by journalists who worked for Murdoch.

(snip)
Democrats are suspicious that Murdoch’s media companies, which include the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, may have used illegal practices in the United States.

“I can tell you that there are questions about whether the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has been violated by Rupert Murdoch and his news empire and what’s going on in England is startling,” Durbin said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/171895-durbin-calls-...

[pscot]

9. I saw that

I just don't believe much of anything that any of them say anymore. I hope they'll do it. I want them to do it. But I'm afraid that even if they do hold hearings, nothing will result except grand-standing for the cameras until things blow over. You know as well as I there won't be a single Republican willing to take a hard line against Murdoch's corrupt brand of journalism. They'll obstruct and obfuscate until the Democrats get tired and give up, which probably won't take all that long. We no longer have a functioning democracy, responsive to the will of the people. McConnell's right. Voting doesn't seem to be working. Go read Hunter's front page diary over at Dkos, "As seen on TV". It's powerful and insightful stuff. Read down and you get this, which I think gets to the nitty gritty:

An uninformed vote is random noise within the system: it will do nothing of value, but will do no harm, as it will be counterbalanced by other uninformed votes. If we truly count an ignorant vote as a random vote, after all, then the outcome of every "uninformed" election would be a near-tie, with the identity and margin of the winner determined only by random chance. The simplest elements of game theory will demonstrate that even if the vast majority of the votes in an election are uninformed, and therefore random, the outcome will be decided solely by the informed votes, which will break the theoretical tie and come to some theoretical decision (presuming, to be strict about it, that the number of informed votes is greater than the margin of random noise within the uninformed votes.)

This is the happy coincidence (or genius) of democracy; it could survive even in a population of the most lazy imbeciles, so long as there is some measurable fraction of citizens that takes their civic responsibilities seriously enough to inform themselves on the issues before the nation, and cast their votes accordingly.


The real-world bloody axe in our happy theoretical gears, however, is the presence of misinformation. A misinformed vote will bend the apparent will of the electorate just as well as an informed one, because it, too, is not random, and a vote based on misinformation is, in the voting booth, in fact indistinguishable from one based on true knowledge. While an uninformed vote is largely nullified by other uninformed votes, a misinformed vote has an aggregate direction: there is no natural counterweight, and the only imagined non-natural counterweight would be an exactly equal amount of misinformation pressing in the other direction.

[malaise]

4. Hehehehe - will he go before the courts first

"A small number of officers may have taken illegal payments. That is fundamentally corrupt," Met Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson told the BBC. "If true, I will be determined to root them out, find them and put them in front of the criminal court."


http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/17/met-chief-faces-questions-spa

Lots of bribes were made starting with the Commish. If he didn't know about the connections then he can't be the Commish!!

Murdoch is up Shite creek without a paddle.