Rupert Murdoch has filed for divorce from his third wife, Wendi Deng Murdoch, saying their 14-year marriage had "broken down irretrievably." The decision, two weeks before News Corp's split into separate entertainment and publishing companies, should have "no effect" on either business, people close to the group said, but it marked the end of a relationship that often caused friction in Mr Murdoch's intertwined family and company interests. Ms Murdoch, who caught Mr Murdoch's eye as a junior executive at Star TV in Asia when she asked why his China strategy was "so bad," has no equity in News Corp and no voting rights. The couple's children, Grace and Chloe, have 8.73m class A non-voting shares worth $270m, but Ms Murdoch is not a trustee of the trust that administers them. Grace and Chloe, baptised on the banks of the river Jordan, have an economic interest but no control of the separate trust through which the Murdoch family controls 39.4 per cent of the voting stock. Mr Murdoch's divorce from his second wife, Anna, cost him $1.7bn in stock and cash, and his decision to remarry caused tension with his older children, who are close in age to the 44-year-old Wendi. A family settlement kept voting rights in the hands of his four adult children: Prudence, Liz, Lachlan and James. Wendi Murdoch was reportedly furious to discover that her children would have no voting control when her husband revealed the agreement in a 2006 PBS television interview with Charlie Rose. The following year, Mr Murdoch, whose net worth is estimated by Bloomberg at $12.1bn, handed each of his six children about $160m worth of News Corp class A shares. That money, the first sizeable cash distribution any of them had received, helped Liz build Shine, the television production business she later sold to News Corp, and funded Lachlan's Australian investment portfolio. Ms Murdoch, the daughter of a Guangzhou factory director, has become an art collector and film producer with a social circle stretching from Tony Blair to Bono. She made headlines in 2011 by slapping away a pie-flinging heckler at Mr Murdoch's appearance before a parliamentary inquiry into phone hacking. She has never held a senior executive role but was responsible for MySpace China and acted as an important go-between for Mr Murdoch in China in the early years of their relationship, when he was more optimistic about expanding in China's heavily regulated media market. The couple signed a prenuptial agreement before their 1999 wedding. Its terms were not immediately available, but people close to the Murdoch family said they did not expect that Ms Murdoch would obtain any voting rights in a settlement. Ira Garr of Garr Silpe, the lawyer representing Mr Murdoch, declined to disclose details of the divorce filing. Mr Murdoch, 82, has made clear his hope of passing his business to his children, sparking years of speculation about succession. James Murdoch will be deputy chief operating officer in the renamed 21st Century Fox entertainment company, after it spins off its publishing and Australian businesses into the new News Corp on June 28. Separately, Mr Murdoch announced that David Devoe, his chief financial officer for 23 years who played a central role in his many deals, would retire after the company splits. Mr Devoe, a BSkyB director, will stay on the 21st Century Fox board as John Nallen, his deputy for 12 years, steps up to the CFO role.