Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Another Murdoch News Corp. Employee Arrested On Bribery Charges

This arrest is related to the News Corporation hacking/bribery scandal in Britain, not the News Corporation bribery investigation in China:

Geoff Webster, the deputy editor of the Sun, has been charged over alleged criminal offences relating to payments of £8,000 to two public officials.

Webster was charged on Wednesday with two counts of conspiring to commit misconduct in public office during 2010 and 2011.

"The first offence relates to allegations that Mr Webster, between July 2010 and August 2011, authorised payments totalling £6,500 for information supplied by a public official to one of his journalists," the Crown Prosecution Service said.

"The second offence relates to an allegation that in November 2010, Mr Webster authorised a payment of £1,500 for information provided by an unknown public official."

Alison Levitt QC, principal legal adviser to the director of public prosecutions, said the decisions arose from Operation Elveden, the Metropolitan police's investigation into allegations of unlawful provision of information to journalists by public officials.

"We have concluded, following a careful review of the evidence, that Geoff Webster, who at the time of the alleged offending was deputy editor of the Sun newspaper, should be charged with two offences of conspiring to commit misconduct in public office, contrary to section 1(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1977," she said.

...

 Webster was arrested in February last year, along with four other Sun employees. One of that group, chief reporter John Kay, has already been charged. The CPS said it was making no further immediate announcements on charging decisions in the remaining three cases.

In addition, Rupert Murdoch's Sun newspaper apologized publicly to an MP for hacking into her phone and text messages after someone stole her cell phone in 2010:

Rupert Murdoch's British tabloid paper, the Sun, has apologized to a politician for accessing information on a mobile phone that had been stolen from her, the BBC reports.
Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh's phone was stolen from her car in October 2010. 
British police later told her that the Sun had been accessing her text messages from around this date.

In London's High Court today, the Sun, part of Murdoch's News International group of newspapers, apologized for accessing the private information, and agreed to pay McDonagh "very substantial damages".

Exactly who stole the phone has not been revealed, though the Sun has not accepted any responsibility for that crime. There had been earlier reports that the phone was handed in to the paper by "a member of the public." 
...  
This latest news is just the newest development in accusations of phone hacking and other unsavory practices by Murdoch's U.K. journalists. Murdoch's best-selling U.K. newspaper, the News of the World, was shut down after serious accusations about phone hacking came to light in 2011.

While the Sun was largely able to escape accusations about phone hacking, these new allegations could prove difficult for Murdoch's British newspapers to shake. Today a lawyer for phone hacking victims told the High Court that there were potentially "hundreds" of new victims.

Aren't you glad that NYSED Commissioner John King, Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, Governor Andrew Cuomo, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and some others in power in Albany think handing over confidential student information, data and files to Rupert Murdoch's company is just swell?

I mean, how could a company that has seen nearly a hundred employees arrested on hacking, bribery, conspiracy and/or cover-up charges related to hacking and bribery on three different continents (Europe, Australia, and Asia) do anything wrong with all that information?

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