Former Murdoch Aides to Be Charged With Bribery
LONDON — In a dramatic new turn in the scandals swirling around Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper outpost, prosecutors said on Tuesday that two former top executives — Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks — will be charged with making corrupt payments to public officials along with an an array of previous accusations.
The development has far-reaching implications for Prime Minister David Cameron, who hired Mr. Coulson, a former editor of The News of the World tabloid, as his director of communications while in opposition and kept him on after coming to power in the 2010 elections. Mr. Cameron said at the time that he had accepted Mr. Coulson’s assurances that he was not involved in any criminal wrongdoing while he was the paper’s editor. But the Labour opposition has frequently accused the prime minister of poor judgment.
Ms. Brooks was also a neighbor and personal friend of Mr. Cameron. In one of several inquiries into the hacking scandal, she testified in May that they kept in touch by telephone, text message and e-mail, meeting at lunches and dinners and socializing at parties, summer outings and Christmas celebrations. The Crown Prosecution Service said on Tuesday that Mr. Coulson and Ms. Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, were among five people who should be charged as part of a police inquiry called Operation Elveden. The investigation ran in parallel with other investigations related to a phone hacking scandal that led to the closing of The News of the World.
Among the five were Clive Goodman, a former royal correspondent at The News of the World, who served a brief jail term in 2007 for hacking into voice mail accounts in the royal household.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/21/world/europe/former-murdoch-aides-to-be-charged-with-bribery.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print
