ABC News Says DOJ to Expand FBI Probe of News of the World; Possible FCPA Violations at Issue
Relying on unidentified sources, ABC News says the U.S. Department of Justice is going to look at whether the British tabloid News of the World routinely paid bribes to police.
If so, that could implicate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, potentially leading to a larger–and expensive–U.S. probe of the newspaper, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., a publicly held American company.
Meanwhile, the scandal over the newspaper’s reported widespread telephone voicemail hacking of celebrities and others, including the account of a missing 13-year-old girl who was later found to have been murdered, has felled two current and former executives and two top London cops. Today, Rupert Murdoch testified before Parliament, saying that he’d done nothing wrong.
However, his 42-year-old wife stole the show as a man shoved a shaving-cream pie toward the 80-year-old media mogul during the hearing, according to the Company Town blog of the Los Angeles Times. Before either his son or his bodyguard could react, Wendi Deng reportedly jumped up from where she was sitting behind her husband and took a swing at the unidentified assailant.
No one was hurt.
Additional and related coverage:
Bloomberg: “James Murdoch Boosts Chances of News Corp. Top Job at Phone-Hack Hearing”
Daily Mail: “She was hero of the hour–now Wendi Murdoch’s right hook looks set to make her movie producing debut a hit too”
