Every director of News International seems to 'know nothing' about hacking.
Now I'm guessing here - and I stress that - but just suppose that was the case because all the payments in question were routed through offshore entities - located in what I and my colleagues who research these issues called 'secrecy jurisdictions'? That would have been entirely possible - and how convenient it would have been. And it's not as if it has not happened before in multinational corporations.
But if - and I stress if - that's the case then the reasons for demanding full accounts on public record for all companies within multinational corporations and full country-by-country reporting plus full accounts on public record in all jurisdictions around the world is confirmed as being one of the highest priority if corruption is to be eliminated.
And at the very least we have to know if this was the case, or not.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
I think it may be perfectly possible that NI auditors would not be able to spot which payments are illegal. The papers, especially the downmarket ones, have been paying those with a story for ages – One former NotW hack was writing on the BBC site about how they knew they had to get stories, and he couldn’t get anyone in the news room to believe a bin man had just turned down £25k, plus a holiday and new car. It is evident that money was thrown at anyone who had a story (Max Clifford doesn’t work out of the goodness of his heart when he represents the ‘little people’).
So PC Smith sees Famous Actor the worse for wear after a night out. He tells the hack he knows, who as per their arrangement slips him a couple of hundred. On the books this appears as £200 to Steve Smith for information. If the Auditor decides to check the source the Journo says “I think he’s a minicab driver, gets a lot of pick ups in the west end”. How do you audit that?