pieced this back together from the past. it was before any of my involvement. the company at the time, i think you re referring to, there was a dismissal, an unfair dismissal case that was brought by mr. goodman, and that was the basis for conducting it was right about the time of the convictions, it was all in that period of time. that s what we inferred in our report last year but despite the assurances. it was right at the time mr. myler had come in, standards had been talked about. this was before all the 2007 business was there, and an investigation was done, or a fact-finding piece around this. and there was an outside counsel was brought in. it was harbottle & lewis by the
something has to be brought to the attention. from a financial threshold point of view i think we addressed that earlier with respect to the settlent, out-of-court settlement with mr. taylor. but also from the standpoint of things like alleged criminality, violations of our own code of conduct, things like that, those are things that are the company s internal audit function as well as the audit committee, as well as the senior executives of the committee are expected to be made aware of, as they were in the case of criminal prosecutions in 2007. you know, whatever efforts were made, whatever rulings there were, we reached news international reached a crisis otherwise you won t be here today and news of the world wouldn t have been closed. who do you hold responsible for that failure? you re saying that people should have told you, but you didn t
ought to take the time and read through everything in that file personally. for clarity, i did say that i did read some of the contents of that. they were shown to me, and what i saw was sufficient to know that it should be that the right thing to do was to hand these over to the authorities to help them with their investigation. i understand that, but do you not think that under the circumstances, and the enormous reputation tphal damage, i m sure you ll be the first to admit has been done to news corp., don t you think as senior executive of the company you should take the time to read through the entire file so you are completely comprised of what happened? i m happy to do so. i think i ve seen a bit of it. okay. my last question is for you mr. rupert murdoch. you said that your friend of 52 years, i think, les hinton has stepped down and has resigned because he was in charge of the company at the time. in other words, he said he was the captain of the ship and therefore h
whole company. mr. rupert murdoch you are the chairman and chief executive of news corp. you are the head of the global company the buck stops with you. given these allegations that you have said indeed when you opened the session you said this was the most humiliating day of your life humble. i m sorry, humble, i beg your pardon. that is a misstatement. the most humble day of your life, you feel humbled by these events. you are ultimately in charge of the company. given your shock at these things being laid out before you and the fact that you didn t know anything about them, have you instructed your editors around the world to engage in a broad review of their own newsroom to make sure this isn t being replicate ned other news corp. papers around the plain, and if so will you do so. no, but i m more than prepared to do so. thank you. one final question, or two final questions. the first is you touched earlier, this is for james
think mr. hinton misled me for a minute, but you must find out for yourself and make your own conclusions. he certainly did not know of anything. i ve got two more members. thank you. before i address my questions to the hearing i d like to make a short declaration of my own which is something i previously declared to the committee which is that my wife is an employee of the company calledded h edlen which is engaged by news corporation. she has no access to the information. i want to share that to you before asking any questions. mr. rupert murdoch you said we live in a transparent society. do you think it s right for people in public life that people can expect total privacy. nope. in the watergate, for example, personal banking and phone records were used,