LONDON — After more than a year of scandal in his British newspaper empire, Rupert Murdoch has resigned his directorships in a string of companies that control titles that include The Sun tabloid, The Times and The Sunday Times, raising fresh speculation of an eventual sale of the newspapers that were a major steppingstone during the decades in which he built his global media empire.
Murdoch, the 81-year-old founder of News Corp., resigned this month as a director of the NI Group, Times Newspaper Holdings and Newscorp Investments in Britain, a company spokesman said Saturday. Those companies are subsidiaries of the News Corp., Murdoch’s $53 billion New York-based company whose assets include The Wall Street Journal, the Fox Broadcasting television networks and the 20th Century Fox film company.
Staff members at the British newspapers received a corporate e-mail confirming Murdoch’s moves Saturday.
The company offered assurances that Murdoch and his family had no immediate plans to sever their connection to the newspapers. The British newspapers were central to building Murdoch’s fortune in the years after he expanded his media holdings beyond his native Australia and before he expanded his empire with far-more profitable enterprises in the United States.
Although there has been consistent speculation that he would sell the newspapers entirely once dozens of impending lawsuits alleging phone hacking have been concluded, the e-mail said he intends to remain chairman of the newspaper and publishing business, according to an employee who did not want to be identified discussing a confidential internal document.
“Last week, Mr. Murdoch stepped down from a number of boards, many of them small subsidiary boards, both in the U.K. and U.S.,” the spokesman for News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of the News Corp., said Saturday, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with company policy.
She described Murdoch’s resignations from the British directorships as “nothing more than a corporate housecleaning exercise” ahead of the restructuring announced last month that will split News Corp. into two entities. One company will consist primarily of newspapers and other print assets, while the other will own the far more profitable television and film enterprises.
The move was a turnaround from last February when Murdoch skipped the Oscars and flew to London to personally oversee the inaugural issue of the Sunday version of The Sun, pledging his “unwavering support” in a memorandum to employees.
The British newspapers, with which Murdoch has had a strong personal bond since moving his corporate base to London from Australia in the 1960s, have been badly tarnished in the past year by revelations of widespread phone hacking and other newsroom wrongdoing, particularly at The Sun and News of the World, a 168-year-old tabloid that was one of the country’s most profitable papers.
The scandal has led to a wide-ranging investigation by Scotland Yard, whose investigators have been investigating allegations that the Murdoch-owned newspapers illegally intercepted the voice-mail messages of hundreds of people, including politicians, athletes, celebrities and crime victims, and that the wrongdoing extended to computer-hacking and making payments to public officials, including police officers, in search of scoops.
The scandal prompted Murdoch to close News of the World last summer and led in recent months to the arrests of about 50 people, many of them executives, editors and reporters at the Murdochowned newspapers, on suspicion of criminal activities.
Information for this article was contributed by David Carr of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 07/22/2012