I am going to describe how action should be swiftly taken to curb Rupert Murdoch and his newspapers now that supposition and dark suspicion have become proven fact. News International, a large and powerful media organisation, Mr Murdoch's company, systematically invades people's privacy through phone hacking, corrupts the police by making large payments to individual officers, and compromises fair trials as a result of publishing reports that are likely to prejudice juries. 
 
 It operates without restraint and has no sense of right or wrong. It doesn't yet represent the same threat to British society as the Italian mafia does to Italy. But there are sufficient similarities to tell us that if we don't act now, worse will follow. For unchecked, News International's illegal practices would grow ever more far reaching, more police officers would be suborned, more trials ruined. And more politicians would be bent to Mr Murdoch's will. For, just as Italian politicians have courted the mafia, so British politicians have fawned over News International executives and editors. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, even brought a former editor into Downing Street who, it is now alleged, authorised the payments of bribes to the police. Well meaning though large advertisers may be in withdrawing their business from the News of the World, that won't curb Mr Murdoch. And although I have willingly signed up to the campaign that calls for a public inquiry ( hackinginquiry.org/), that would only be a staging post. In fact, the mechanisms to bring the directors of News International to book already exist. They are part of the law of the land. 
 
 The most important step is to make use of the powers contained in what is known as The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. It was under Section 1 of this Act that the News of the World phone hackers were convicted and imprisoned. So far as the directors and executives of News International in their personal capacities are concerned, the crucial passage in the legislation comes towards the end of the Act. It is Section 79. 
 
 Forgive me for now penetrating deeply into the thickets of the law, but eventually, in the growing scandal of the News of the World's behaviour, everything will turn on Section 79. I hope charges will be brought under this section. It is entitled the "Criminal liability of directors etc". (I like the "etc"). It states that "Where an offence under any provision of this Act... is committed by a body corporate and is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to any neglect on the part of a director, manager, secretary or other similar officer of the body corporate, or any person who was purporting to act in any such capacity, he (as well as the body corporate) shall be guilty of that offence and liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly." 
 
 To see how Section 79 might work, start with the smaller fry, say Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International. In a letter to staff published earlier this week, Ms Brooks, following the revelations that her reporters had hacked into the mobile phone of the murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, when she was editor of the News of the World, attempted to exculpate herself. "We were all appalled and shocked when we heard about these allegations yesterday... At the moment we only know what we have read... I hope that you all realise it is inconceivable that I knew or worse, sanctioned these appalling allegations." In other words, Ms Brooks is claiming that she was unaware of the criminal invasion of privacy that had the effect of vainly raising the hopes of the parents that their daughter was still alive and that at the same impeded the police operation. 
 
 But go back to the Act. To avoid criminal proceedings, having not initiated or consented to the Dowler phone hacking won't do as a defence because there are other tests. Let us go to these. Connived? That would require an examination of how Ms Brooks habitually conducted herself as editor. "Connived", for instance, might be warmly congratulating reporters who produced stories that could only have been acquired illegally. But perhaps there was no connivance. Even so, Ms Brooks would not be home safe and dry. "Where an offence is... attributable to any neglect", states the Act. 
 
 This is the catch-all section of the Act. If you have presided over an organisation that has conducted criminal activities, either you gave the orders, or you gave permission, or you connived, but if you did none of these things, then you were neglectful. That is the trap, that is the box in which the directors of News International will find themselves. It is also the bit that Ms Brooks would find hard to understand. For, as she indicated earlier this week, she isn't going to resign."I am aware of the speculation about my position. Therefore it is important you all know that as chief executive, I am determined to lead the company to ensure we do the right thing and resolve these serious issues." This comes straight out of the dishonorable, cowardly, defensive, mind-your-back school of management that says that if I didn't know, I cannot be blamed. It doesn't recognise neglect. Instead it substitutes the self-serving, conceited thesis that "only I, who was at the helm during the disaster, can steer us to safety". 
 
 But what about Mr Murdoch? Would he be touched by Section 79? Only a lawyer could give an authoritative opinion. But I note these words in the Act. It bears on a director, manager, secretary or other similar officer of the body corporate, or "any person who was purporting to act in any such capacity" (my italics). 
 
 Whether Mr Murdoch falls under this rubric would be for a court to decide. But I have no doubt that Mr Murdoch does act as if he were a director or a manager. For although technically News International is part of a public company, for all intents and purposes it is conducted as if it were a court with Mr Murdoch as its sovereign. One reason why Ms Brooks isn't resigning is that she is a courtier. Courtiers don't resign. They stay or go at the monarch's pleasure. And while it may be difficult for company lawyers to understand a monarchical organisation, judges should do so – for they are, after all, "Her Majesty's Judges". 
 
 Rupert Murdoch has owned the News of the World for nearly 42 years. When he arrived in England as an unknown Australian newspaper proprietor to bid for the News of the World in 1969 in opposition to Robert Maxwell, I went to meet him at Heathrow Airport and travelled into town with him. I was a young financial journalist. When we got to the Savoy Hotel, he went up to reception to sign in. As soon as he was given his room number, he demanded that he be given a different room. I asked him why. You see, he said, I fear that my room will have been bugged. 
 
 Even then phone hacking and electronic eavesdropping obsessed him. Now they will be his undoing and Section 79 could be his final reckoning. 
 
 a.whittamsmith@independent.co.uk ||||| There’s no doubt the public outcry over the News of the World’s illegal hacking of mobile phones and payments to police officials is serious. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t close profitable newspapers willingly. (Heck, he doesn’t even like to close massively unprofitable papers.) But is it so serious that a top News Corp. executive — perhaps even Murdoch himself — could end up being convicted on criminal charges? 
 
 Andreas Whittam Smith thinks so. He cites the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act of 2000, the law used to imprison News of the World reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who teamed up to invade the voicemail accounts of various celebrities. Smith notes that the law, as worded, has remarkably broad scope: 
 
 Where an offence under any provision of this Act… is committed by a body corporate and is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to any neglect on the part of a director, manager, secretary or other similar officer of the body corporate, or any person who was purporting to act in any such capacity, he (as well as the body corporate) shall be guilty of that offence and liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly. 
 
 “If you have presided over an organisation that has conducted criminal activities, either you gave the orders, or you gave permission, or you connived, but if you did none of these things, then you were neglectful,” writes Smith. “That is the trap, that is the box in which the directors of News International will find themselves.” 
 
 I ran this reading by Jonathan P. Armstrong, a partner at the law firm Duane Morris who specializes in corporate law with a concentration in technology and compliance. “My view is that might be a stretch,” he says. That’s because the application of the “attributable to any neglect” clause isn’t quite as broad as it sounds. “That sort of clause exists because it’s lifted out of health and safety legislation,” he says. “Say you had an airplane and you never changed the tires. I don’t think, in the U.K., something like failure to have a policy preventing hacking — that wouldn’t be a big enough neglect to get by a jury.” 
 
 Where the neglect cause could conceivably apply is to Rebekah Brooks, News International’s CEO. Brooks has denied having any knowledge of the illegal hacking, but she was editor of the NotW at the time it published stories that cited voice mail messages obtained that way, and it was Brooks who first hired the private investigator who hacked the voicemail of murdered teenager Milly Dowler. In Brooks’s case, therefore, it’s possible to argue that the only way she wouldn’t have known about the hacking was by making it clear she didn’t want to know. “The quaint old English saying for that we have is ‘Nelsonian ignorance,’” says Armstrong. The phrase refers to Lord Nelson, the famed admiral who was blind in one eye. 
 
 Already, police are reportedly planning to arrest Andy Coulson, who succeeded Brooks as editor, either on similar grounds or because they have evidence that he did, in fact, condone the hacking. 
 
 But don’t expect the arrests to rise to the very top of the News Corp. food chain — to Rupert Murdoch, or even to his son, James — unless evidence tying them directly to the illegal hacks comes to light. “The reality is cases that are that much of a stretch normally don’t run in the U.K.,” says Armstrong. “We don’t have the same system you have in the U.S. of an attorney general who might see a lot of merit, politically, in seeing this go ahead. Generally speaking, prosecutions will only run where the prosecutors are convinced they’ll be able to persuade the jury beyond all reasonable doubt that the guy had his hands all over this.” ||||| James Murdoch scaled the rungs of the global media empire that his father built. Now scandal taints the heir apparent, threatening to derail the expected succession and shaking the assumption that the Murdoch dynasty would preserve its tight grip over the multibillion-dollar business. 
 
 Lachlan Murdoch leaves the home of his father Rupert in London, Monday, July 18, 2011. James Murdoch scaled the rungs of the global media empire that his father built. Now scandal taints the heir apparent,... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - A Sunday July 10, 2011 photo from files showing Chief executive of News Corporation Europe and Asia, James Murdoch gesturing as he leaves his father Chairman of News Corporation Rupert Murdoch's... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - A Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009 photo from files showing media industry entrepreneur Elizabeth Murdoch taking part in a breakfast meeting about 'Digital Britain' at Downing Street in London. Some analysts... (Associated Press) 
 
 Founder Rupert Murdoch, 80, has long expressed a wish to hand his publicly traded News Corp. to his offspring, and he retains the voting power to make key decisions. But shareholders and board members are said to be troubled by revelations of wrongdoing on Murdoch's watch, and feel the U.S.-based company needs fresh leadership. 
 
 A pivotal moment for the family comes Tuesday when the media mogul and his son testify before British lawmakers investigating the hacking and alleged police bribery at a now-shuttered tabloid, News of the World. 
 
 "The future is looking increasingly gray" for James Murdoch, said Ivor Gaber, professor of political journalism at City University London. "There are now investors, particularly in the United States, who are suggesting that the time has come to end the Murdochs' dynastic hold on News Corp." 
 
 News Corp. board member Thomas Perkins said Monday that Rupert Murdoch has the full support of the company's board of directors, and they are not considering elevating Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey to replace him amid the phone-hacking scandal in Britain. 
 
 In an interview with The Associated Press, Perkins denied a report that said that independent directors on Monday considered the company's succession plan, including naming Carey as CEO. 
 
 Perkins, 79, has been an independent News Corp. director since 1996 and is cofounder of Silicon Valley venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He said a succession plan has long been in place given Murdoch's age, but it had not been brought up in light of recent revelations about phone hacking and alleged payments to British police. 
 
 "I can assure you, there has been no discussion at the board level in connection with this current scandal of making any changes. The board supports top management totally," Perkins said. "The board has been misled, as has top management been misled, by very bad people at a very low level in the organization." 
 
 Some analysts believe Murdoch is positioning 42-year-old daughter Elisabeth as a successor in the event that 38-year-old James, chief executive of his father's European and Asian operations, is forced to step aside or faces arrest. 
 
 "At the end of the day, that's what made it a success. It's 'Brand Murdoch,'" said Richard Hillgrove, a London-based public relations consultant and former commentator for Murdoch-owned newspapers in New Zealand. "He's going to do anything in his power to make sure it stays that way." 
 
 Hillgrove described Elisabeth Murdoch, who is expected to join the board of News Corp. in October, as the "likely contender" for leadership of the company and noted that she appears "untainted and pretty clean" in comparison to the pressure bearing down on her brother, James. 
 
 There have been unconfirmed reports in the British media of family tension and dissatisfaction on the part of Elisabeth with how the company has been run; some observers speculate people close to the family have leaked information to elevate her stature. 
 
 However, a lawsuit in the United States has questioned News Corp.'s move in February to buy Shine Group., the television production company founded in Britain by Elisabeth, in a $670 million deal viewed by some shareholders as overpriced and fueled by nepotism. And while the company is successful, Elisabeth lacks experience at the highest levels of international management. 
 
 Another Murdoch son, 39-year-old Lachlan, is on the board of News Corp., but he quit a high-level position in the company in 2005 and does not have a management role. He is saddled in part by the legacy of a failed investment in an Australian telecom company a decade ago. 
 
 Chase Carey, the American deputy chairman and president of News Corp., could step in to head the group as an option from outside the family. He previously worked with Fox television, a company holding. 
 
 Murdoch crafted a behemoth over the decades, acquiring newspaper, television, publishing and entertainment interests in Asia, Europe, the United States and Latin America. New York-based News Corp., which employs more than 50,000 people, said it had total assets as of March of $60 billion, and total annual revenues of $33 billion, though the scandal has pushed down share prices. 
 
 In 2001, a former wife of Rupert Murdoch predicted that there would be heartache among her children _ James, Lachlan and Elisabeth _ when the time came to choose his successor. At the time, Anna Murdoch Mann told the Australian Women's Weekly magazine that she would prefer that none of her children took the reins. 
 
 "I think they're all so good that they could do whatever they wanted, really," she said. "But I think there's going to be a lot of heartbreak and hardship with this. There's been such a lot of pressure that they needn't have had at their age." 
 
 The accusations of phone hacking and police bribery by journalists at the News of the World reached into the elder Murdoch's inner circle with the arrest Sunday of Rebekah Brooks, former head of his British newspaper unit. 
 
 James Murdoch did not directly oversee News of the World, where the phone hacking of celebrities and others allegedly occurred, but he approved payments to some of the paper's most prominent hacking victims, including 700,000 pounds ($1.1 million) to Professional Footballers' Association chief Gordon Taylor. 
 
 He said he "did not have a complete picture" when he approved the payouts. Still, commentators view his position as fragile because of questions about whether the criminal investigation will go higher up the chain of command at News Corp. Additionally, the company could be liable under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars American companies from bribing foreign officials for business. 
 
 Journalists at News of the World hacked the voice mail of mobile telephones in an attempt to get information for stories that would help sell newspapers, and allegedly paid police for information that could also be used in the production of news reports. 
 
 Louise Cooper, an analyst in the London office of the brokerage BGC Partners, described years of speculation about who would take control after Rupert Murdoch as a perpetual process of "one's up, another one's down" that focuses on the tycoon's children. In the end, she said, it is the patriarch's decision. 
 
 "He still has absolute control over that company," Cooper said. She said that barring further revelations about the involvement of James Murdoch in the scandal, "it's difficult to write him off completely." 
 
 Rupert Murdoch controls News Corp. through a family trust that holds 40 percent of the company's Class B voting shares. The succession question has centered on James, Elisabeth and Lachlan, children by Murdoch's second marriage to Anna Torv, later Anna Murdoch Mann after she remarried. 
 
 Elisabeth is married to prominent British public relations executive Matthew Freud. She resigned as managing director of British Sky Broadcasting, a lucrative satellite broadcaster in which News Corp. is the biggest shareholder, in 2000 to go her own way. This month, Rupert Murdoch dropped a bid to take full control of BSkyB in response to the uproar over phone hacking. 
 
 Lachlan Murdoch, once seen as the heir apparent, had been elevated to deputy chief operating officer of News Corp. by the time he quit in 2005 to go back to Australia. 
 
 That left James as the expected heir. He has been chairman and CEO of the company's European and Asian operations since 2007, and later became deputy chief operating officer of News Corp. 
 
 Rupert Murdoch has another daughter, Prudence, from his first marriage to Patricia Booker; she is married to Alasdair MacLeod, who stepped down last year after 20 years as a News Corp. executive, most recently as managing director of its Australian newspapers. 
 
 Murdoch also has two daughters, 9-year-old Grace and 7-year-old Chloe, with his third wife, Wendi Deng. She was a junior News Corp. executive in Hong Kong before marrying Murdoch in 1999 at the age of 32. Her name has occasionally cropped up in succession speculation in the past. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Robert Barr and Martin Benedyk contributed to this report.
– Rupert Murdoch, who yesterday shut down the 168-year-old News of the World, faces the worst PR crisis of his six-decade career, reports the Washington Post. So far, the scandal is threatening to derail Murdoch's $12 billion bid for British Sky Broadcasting. It could even force Murdoch to testify before the British Parliament under oath. But as bad as things are, could Murdoch himself end up in jail? One analyst, writing in the Independent, thinks so. Andreas Whittam Smith explains that phone hackers were convicted under Britain's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, and he points readers to Section 79 of the act, which states that when a corporate body commits "an offense under any provision of this act ... with the consent or connivance of ... a director, manager, secretary or other similar officer, he (as well as the body corporate) shall be guilty of that offense and liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly." Perhaps Murdoch is a stretch, but observers think Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International and former editor at News of the World, could be in danger of criminal charges. Just like this former editor.