As I write, the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt is wriggling on an exquisitely sharp hook. He has to find a way of stopping the Digger’s take-over of BSkyB without triggering a very expensive lawsuit from News Corporation. It may be simpler than he thinks. Apart altogether from the question of whether anyone involved with the Digger is a “fit and proper” person to run a broadcasting company, there is the fact that his decision to approve the BSkYB takeover was apparently based entirely on “assurances” received from News Corp about what would happen to Sky News. Given what we now know about the way News International has concealed information from the police, misled Parliament and possible obstructed the course of justice, Hunt could easily — and plausibly — maintain that no assurances from such a source can be taken seriously.

Here’s Statement #1, dated September 2009.

“Concerns about News of the World hacking are codswallop that looks like a politically-motivated put-up job by the Labour party.”

Statement #2, dated July 2011.

“It is unbelievable that victims of some of the most odious crimes in recent years might have had their suffering prolonged and intensified by such blatant intrusion into their lives. If true, it suggests that there was no limit to the callousness of the journalists and provate investigators involved. And if some police officers were indeed paid as part of this process, there is only one word for this: corruption”.

So who made these statements?

Yes, you guessed it: Boris ‘Bollinger’ Johnson, currently Mayor of London.

Given that News Corp is a US company, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) applies to it– and to its executives and Directors.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, as amended, 15 U.S.C. §§ 78dd-1, et seq. ("FCPA"), was enacted for the purpose of making it unlawful for certain classes of persons and entities to make payments to foreign government officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business. Specifically, the anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA prohibit the willful use of the mails or any means of instrumentality of interstate commerce corruptly in furtherance of any offer, payment, promise to pay, or authorization of the payment of money or anything of value to any person, while knowing that all or a portion of such money or thing of value will be offered, given or promised, directly or indirectly, to a foreign official to influence the foreign official in his or her official capacity, induce the foreign official to do or omit to do an act in violation of his or her lawful duty, or to secure any improper advantage in order to assist in obtaining or retaining business for or with, or directing business to, any person.

This is the section of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) that could land James Murdoch in gaol.

Wow! This is interesting.

Meanwhile, US law may enter the fray. A former Labour cabinet minister has alerted attention to the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes an American company (News Corp) liable for colossal fines if any employee bribes a foreign official (the Met police) even if no one at head office knew. What's more, any whistleblower inside the company (sacked News of the World reporters), stands to win a percentage of that fine if they report acts of bribery.

Another excellent Telegraph piece by Peter Oborne, which contains this interesting (but not surprising) revelation.

Though many were appalled, Murdoch himself was protected by his potent political contacts. Tony Blair, for example, would do anything to help out his close friend and ally. I can even disclose that, before the last election, Tony Blair rang Gordon Brown to try to persuade the Labour Prime Minister to stop the Labour MP Tom Watson raising the issue of phone hacking.

There’s an interesting parallel between the phone-hacking scandal and the MPs’ expenses scandal. In both cases, the general public paid little attention to the story in its early stages: it was seen as some kind of kerfuffle in particular circles. Nothing to do with anything serious. The phone-hacking story, for example, was perceived as being just about celebs and footballers. But then there came a moment when everything changed. In the expenses scandal it was the revelation that MPs were claiming for duck-houses and having their moats cleared. In the phone-hacking story it was the discovery that the phone of Milly Dowler had been hacked — and that some messages had been deleted because her voicemail inbox was full — which misled her family into thinking that she might have been deleting messages and might therefore still be alive. At this point, public anger erupted and the game was up.

Terrific interview with Nick Davies, the main man behind the Guardian‘s unearthing of the phone-hacking story. Links to what I was saying yesterday.

From today’s Guardian.

Police are investigating evidence that a News International executive may have deleted millions of emails from an internal archive, in an apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard’s inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal.

The archive is believed to have reached back to January 2005 revealing daily contact between News of the World editors, reporters and outsiders, including private investigators. The messages are potentially highly valuable both for the police and for the numerous public figures who are suing News International.

According to legal sources close to the police inquiry, a senior executive is believed to have deleted “massive quantities” of the archive on two separate occasions, leaving only a small fraction to be disclosed. One of the alleged deletions is said to have been made at the end of January this year, just as Scotland Yard was launching Operation Weeting, its new inquiry into the affair.

The allegation directly contradicts repeated claims from News International that it is co-operating fully with police in order to expose its history of illegal news-gathering. It is likely to be seen as evidence that the company could not pass a “fit and proper person” test for its proposed purchase of BSkyB.

From Peter Oborne, writing in The Spectator.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that BP threw an extravagant party, with oysters and expensive champagne. Let’s imagine that Britain’s most senior politicians were there — including the Prime Minister and his chief spin doctor. And now let’s imagine that BP was the subject of two separate police investigations, that key BP executives had already been arrested, that further such arrests were likely, and that the chief executive was heavily implicated.

Let’s take this mental experiment a stage further: BP’s chief executive had refused to appear before a Commons enquiry, while MPs who sought to call the company to account were claiming to have been threatened. Meanwhile, BP was paying what looked like hush money to silence people it had wronged, thereby preventing embarrassing information entering the public domain.

And now let’s stretch probability way beyond breaking point. Imagine that the government was about to make a hugely controversial ruling on BP’s control over the domestic petroleum market. And that BP had a record of non-payment of British tax. The stench would be overwhelming. There would be outrage in the Sun and the Daily Mail — and rightly so — about Downing Street collusion with criminality. The Sunday Times would have conducted a fearless investigation, and the Times penned a pained leader. In parliament David Cameron would have been torn to shreds.

Instead, until this week there has been almost nothing, save for a lonely campaign by the Guardian. Because the company portrayed above is not BP, but News International, owner of the Times, the Sunday Times, the News of the World and the Sun, approximately one third of the domestic newspaper market. And last week, Jeremy Hunt ruled that Murdoch, who owns a 39 per cent stake in BSkyB, can now buy it outright (save for Sky’s news channel). This consolidates the Australian-born mogul as by far the most significant media magnate in this country, wielding vast political and commercial power.

Great stuff.