Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, News Corporation’s most powerful shareholder after the Murdoch family with 7 percent of the media conglomerate’s voting shares, has rebuffed calls to change its dual-class share structure or leadership in the wake of the phone-hacking affair, the Financial Times reported in its Tuesday edition.

The long-standing friend of Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation’s chairman and chief executive, owns the same class B voting shares as the Murdoch family, which uses the structure to command almost 40 percent of the voting rights with only a 12 percent financial stake. Class A shares do not have voting rights, the FT reported.
News Corp. is embroiled in a phone-hacking scandal that has led to closure of the 168-year-old News of the World.
But the prince, nephew of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, affirmed his strong support for Rupert and James Murdoch’s televised testimony before the British parliament on July 19. He said they had responded to questions from the MPs with honesty and integrity, and echoed their condemnation of phone hacking at the now-closed News of the World.
“Unfortunately, the (phone hacking) incident gave weapons to competitors who created a hysteria,” said Prince Alwaleed. “What took place was wrong,” he added, “but the media overleveraged this” and created an environment in which News Corp. had to abandon its bid for full control of British Sky Broadcasting.
Prince Alwaleed backed Rupert and James Murdoch’s handling of the crisis, but said there was a need for stricter governance rules within the media empire to prevent such incidents from recurring. “Things need to be tightened,” the prince said: “We need stronger rules in place to ensure that no unethical incidents happen again in any News Corp entities.”
Asked about specific changes he wanted to see, the prince said the matter was for the board of directors to consider, rather than shareholders or media pundits. A media mogul in his own right, Prince Alwaleed owns Rotana Media, a major Middle Eastern broadcast presence, in which News Corp. holds a 14.5 percent stake.
The prince also controls 95 percent of the investment vehicle Kingdom Holding. The richest businessman in the Arab world, with a net worth of nearly $20 billion, he controls a portfolio that extends from luxury hotel properties to stakes in other major companies, such as Apple and Citigroup, in which the prince is the largest individual investor at 5 percent.
Prince Alwaleed dismissed any suggestion that News Corp. shares might suffer from a “Murdoch discount” as a result of family control, attributing what he described as currently depressed values to generally lackluster results in the wider newspaper industry.
“Rupert, (Chase) Carey (chief operating officer) and James know what they are doing,” he said. “Rupert spent his entire life building this company. It’s just normal that he and his family will chair it and rectify this situation. We need to fix it, and the best people to do it are the people inside the company.”
In his article, published at Al Jazeera English’s website on July 18, 2011, former British MP George Galloway termed business partnership between Prince Alwaleed and Murdoch as “an unholy alliance”.
Galloway writes, “Mr. Murdoch is the co-owner, with Prince Alwaleed, of Fox News -- one of the most virulently anti-Muslim television stations in the world. The station gives a megaphone to the likes of Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin. In the U.S., Fox's role was to throw gallons of petrol on the flames Islamophobia which were leading to the burning of the Holy Quran by vigilantes.”
“Then there is the so-called ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ controversy. The planned building was, of course, not at Ground Zero. It was not a mosque but an Islamic centre. The centre was partially funded by Prince Alwaleed, the co-owner with Murdoch of Islamophobic media fire-raisers including Fox News and the New York Post,” Galloway adds.
“Murdoch's newspapers in Britain are little better than their U.S.-counterparts and include photographs and sexualized images which would never see the light of day in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. As a whole it is safe to say that Murdoch's nearly 200 newspapers -- and his television stations in so far as he can compel the latter which are more tightly regulated -- are bastions of fanatically pro-Israel, anti-Muslim bigotry,” he states.
Galloway wonders, “Yet they are co-owned by a member of the Saudi Royal family who not only approves of these practices, but regards the mogul Murdoch as his ‘good friend’.”
Photo: Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is the co-owner with Rupert Murdoch, of Fox News -- one of the most virulently anti-Muslim television stations in the world.