The chair of News Corp’s Management and Standards Committee, Lord Grabiner QC, is on a £3,000 hourly rate – helping to push the total cost of the company’s phone-hacking investigation to more £53m.
The Lawyer reports that accounts filed by News International show the £53.2m running costs of the MSC were built up ‘primarily by legal and professional fees”.
Grabiner was drafted in to chair the committee tasked with cleaning up the company in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal in July 2011.
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The MSC is independent of News International and is tasked with introducing compliance, ethics and governance procedures at the company, report directly to News Corp board director and former assistant attorney general at the US Department of Justice Joel Klein.
Earlier this month News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch informed staff that the MSC had completed its investigation into his surviving UK titles.
The MSC inquiries have resulted in 12 serving and former senior Sun journalists being arrested on suspicion of being involved in bribery and corruption.
Murdoch said that no wrongdoing had been uncovered at The Times and Sunday Times beyond the illegal hacking by The Times in 2009 of an email account to unmask anonymous police blogger Nightjack.
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