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PARLIAMENTARY REPORT


The report concentrated


primarily on the question of whether the Committee had, in the last Parliament, been misled by witnesses during its inquiry into Press Standards, Privacy and Libel.


UNITED KINGDOM


exhibited wilful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications”, before going on to conclude “Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”. The Committee also had


Mr Jeremy Hunt, MP The Committee accused


three News International executives of misleading it. It also concluded that “corporately, the News of the World and News International misled the committee about the true nature and extent of the internal investigations they professed to have carried out in relation to phone hacking; by making statements they would have known were not fully truthful; and by failing to disclose documents which would have helped expose the truth”. Turning to the senior figures


at the top of News International, the Committee described James Murdoch, then Chief Executive of News Corporation Europe, as having an “astonishing lack of curiosity” about key events and documents. On Rupert Murdoch the


Committee said “on the basis of the facts and evidence before the committee, we conclude that if at all relevant times Rupert Murdoch did not take steps to become fully informed about phone hacking, he turned a blind eye and


tough words for the police and Crown Prosecution Service. Referring to former-Acting Deputy Commissioner Mr John Yates and Director of Public Prosecutions Mr Kier Starmer, the report stated: “Given the extraordinary revelations in the media and in civil court cases in the years that followed, however, they both bear culpability for failing to ensure that the evidence held by the Metropolitan Police was properly investigated in the years afterwards, given all the opportunities to do so, and that the sufficiency of the evidence was not reviewed by the CPS.” The Committee’s


conclusions were not, however, reached unanimously. Four Members of the Committee voted against the report as a whole.


denied by some of those it criticized. News Corporation described the report in a statement as “unjustified and highly partisan” and one of the executives accused of


He said it was more


appropriate that the Culture Secretary would give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry rather than being referred to Sir Alex. He went on to say that he would not wait until Leveson had completed his inquiries to act if evidence emerged that a Minister had broken the code. Rt Hon. Jack Straw, MP,


Rt Hon. Jack Straw, MP


misleading the Committee described the Committee’s conclusions as “unfounded, unfair and erroneous”. The report’s publication


came the day after the second of two parliamentary debates on the relationships between the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and News International. The controversy centered on


a number of emails disclosed to Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into phone hacking and press standards which some took to suggest there may have been contact between Mr Jeremy Hunt, MP, or his staff and the company during its proposed (and later aborted) bid to take over BSkyB. The Leader of the


Rt Hon. Edward Milliband, MP Many of the passages were


also agreed on division, including those quoted above relating to the conduct of the Murdochs and the finding that News International had “corporately” misled the Committee. The report’s findings were


134 | The Parliamentarian | 2012: Issue Two


Opposition, Rt Hon. Edward Miliband, MP, (Lab), argued that the Prime Minister should refer the case to the Prime Minister’s adviser on the Ministerial Code, Sir Alex Allen. Mr Miliband claimed that the code had been broken on three spate occasions by the Culture Secretary. The Prime Minister, Rt Hon.


David Cameron, MP, (Con), rejected the claims that the code had been broken.


(Lab) argued that it was the Prime Minister’s responsibility to investigate potential breaches of the code and that he was failing to do so by not referring the content of the emails and the conduct of the Secretary of State’s special adviser to Sir Alex. However, Rt Hon. Peter Lilley, MP, (Con), argued that Sir Alex’s role was to investigate whether a


Rt Hon. Peter Lilley, MP


Minister’s actions constituted a breach of the code when the facts of the case where known but that the Leveson inquiry was the correct way to establish those facts. The new session of


Parliament began with the Queen’s Speech on 9 May. It seems unlikely that these two issues will go away, with the possibility that the Culture, Media and Sport Committee may seek to pursue further those who it believes misled it and with the Leveson inquiry still to hear from key witnesses from government and elsewhere.


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