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Elisabeth Murdoch won’t join the News Corp. board as planned

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The furor over Rupert Murdoch’s management of News Corp. continues to reverberate.

The mogul’s daughter, Elisabeth Murdoch, had been scheduled to join her father and two brothers on the board of News Corp. after selling her British television production company to News Corp. earlier this year. However, on Friday, the company announced that those plans -- announced in March by Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of the media conglomerate -- had been put on hold.

‘Elisabeth Murdoch suggested to the independent directors some weeks ago that she felt it would be inappropriate to include her nomination to the board of News Corp. at this year’s annual general meeting,’ Viet Dinh, one of News Corp.’s independent directors, said in a statement distributed by News Corp. Dinh is chairman of the media company’s corporate governance committee.

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‘The independent directors agreed that the previously planned nomination should be delayed,’ Dinh said.

The move was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

It was Rupert Murdoch’s desire to have three of his adult children join him on the News Corp. board. His two sons, Lachlan and James, are currently board members.

But during the last month, News Corp. has been reeling over disclosures that reporters working for its now-shuttered News of the World tabloid hacked into the cellphones of not only celebrities and members of the royal family, but crime victims and fallen soldiers. News Corp. was forced to shelve its $12-billion bid for Britain’s largest pay TV provider.

Until now, Elisabeth Murdoch, unlike her brother James, had not been caught up in the scandal.

However, before the controversy erupted in Britain, investors in the U.S. had questioned News Corp.’s $675-million purchase of Elisabeth Murdoch’s company Shine Group. This spring, the New York-based Amalgamated Bank slapped News Corp. with a suit in a Delaware court alleging that nepotism was rife within News Corp., and that the 80-year-old Rupert Murdoch operated the company much like a ‘family candy store.’

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-- Meg James

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