NEWS CORP FACES NEW INVESTIGATION

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp now faces another investigation following allegations that the European edition of the Wall Street Journal concocted a scheme with a Dutch company to boost its circulation figures and to publish favorable stories about the company in return. In the wake of an apparent breach of ethics — if not the law — the publisher of the European edition, Andrew Langhoff, resigned on Tuesday. Although a spokesperson for Dow Jones, which publishes the Journal, maintained on Wednesday that it had informed the Audit Bureau of Circulations of the arrangement between the newspaper and Amsterdam-based Executive Learning Partnership, the ABC said on Thursday that it plans to investigate the sales scheme further based on “new evidence.” It did not specify the nature of the evidence. Meanwhile, today’s (Friday) London Independent observed that Gert Van Mol, whom it described as “the man at the heart of the bulk-buying scheme,” had once claimed in an online posting that he was “responsible for up to 43 per cent of total Wall Street Journal newspaper sales in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Russia.”