| Sunday, February 04, 2007 |
| Rupert Murdoch hands out $100 million each to his six children |
Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire media tycoon, has, in a quite unexpected action, shared some of his enormous wealth with his six children through a family handout of $600 million (£305 million) of shares in his global News Corporation.
Documents lodged with American financial regulators on Friday reveal that Murdoch has given $100 million worth of shares to each of his offspring - but he has made sure that none of them can meddle in the business by distributing stock with no voting rights.
A spokesman for the News Corporation said in New York that the gifts, which changed hands on Wednesday, amounted to "normal financial planning."
He stressed that the children had been treated equally - "each of the six children got an identical number of shares in the disbursement."
News Corporation is the ultimate parent company of British newspapers including the Sun, the Times and the News of the World. It has a controlling interest in the satellite broadcaster BskyB and owns America's conservative Fox network.
The handout represents only a fraction of Rupert Murdoch's entire holding which is over $8 billion in shares.
It is said the careful equality of the handout reflects sensitivity within the Murdoch family over the respective treatment of his children from three different marriages.
Murdoch's adult children - Prudence, Lachlan, Elisabeth and James - reportedly fought their father's efforts to amend the family financial trust to include his two toddlers, Grace and Chloe, from his marriage to Wendi Deng in 1999.
Under the terms of his divorce from his second wife, Ana, the beneficiaries of the trust are limited to his four oldest children.
According to the regulatory filing, Murdoch will be custodian of the shares transferred to his youngest daughters until they reach maturity.
Insiders believe that the handout is more about giving his older children more personal financial wherewithal than any attempt to pass on control of his empire.
Until recently, several of Murdoch's older children were jostling to become heir apparent in running the News Corporation. Lachlan, 35, was regarded as the favourite until he abruptly resigned as the company's deputy chief operating officer in July 2006 and returned to Australia with his wife.
Lachlan was said to be frustrated at interference in his work and he was rumoured to be the most upset of the family at Murdoch's attempts to extend equal financial rights to his new daughters.
For much of the 1990s, Elisabeth, 38, ran BskyB but she left the business and has been running her own production company, Shine, since 2001.
Murdoch nominated James, 34, to the top job at BSkyB four years ago. Despite opposition from minority shareholders who described the appointment as nepotism, he has held the position ever since.
Of Murdoch's adult children, only Prudence, 48, has shown no interest in working in the media industry, though her husband has worked as a senior executive at News Limited.
Though 75 and has survived a cancer scare, Murdoch continues to run his media empire with an aggressively hands-on approach. He has about 38% of News Corporation's voting stock, giving him an effective final say in all significant decisions.
He takes a close interest in day-to-day content of his newspapers and his television channels, In 2006, he admitted that he had intervened in Fox's reporting on riots in Paris because he was unhappy with repeated descriptions of those involved as Muslims.
Starting out with a modest portfolio of Australian local newspapers inherited from his father, Rupert Murdoch has built the world's most extensive media empire.
His News Corporation publishes 175 newspapers, including the English speaking world's top seller, the News of the World. Others include the Sun, the Times, the Sunday Times, the New York Post and the Australian.
News Corp has a 39% stake in BSkyB, owns America's IB Network and Star TV in Asia. It has a 38% share of America's biggest cable network, DirecTV.
In Hollywood, News Corp's Twentieth Century Fox studio was behind recent hits movies such as The Devil Wears Prada and A Night at the Museum. The digital interests include the social networking site MySpace and, in book publishing, it owns HarperCollins.Labels: media |
| posted by a correspondent @ 7:10 AM |
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