Murdoch Among the Most Corrupt Oligarchs in the World
Bio
William K. Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement.
Black developed the concept of "control fraud" frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior
management.
Transcript
Rupert Murdoch is planning to step down as the CEO of 21st Century Fox. To some this is news, but to the rest of us it's been coming for some time now, almost ten years. His sons will be taking over. Murdoch's infamous media empire consists of about a hundred newspapers, dozens of television stations, and he himself is sporting almost $14 billion worth of net worth. His legacy for journalism and news in the world and in the United States in particular is a topic of our next discussion, and particularly how he covered the issue of crime. Financial crime, in specificity. Bill Black is joining us for that.
Bill, as you know, is coming to us now from Quito these days, and he's at the National Institute for Higher Education there. Bill is a former bank regulator and the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is To Own One. Bill, as always, thank you for joining us.
BILL BLACK, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AND LAW, UMKC: Thank you.
PERIES: So Bill, give us a rundown of the significance of his retirement, or his pending retirement and what we have learned from it, as per your recent article.
BLACK: Well, there's probably very little significance. As you say, he has been trying to transition his sons into positions where they can be the natural folks to take over the organization. He ran into a problem because James, the one who by the way he's setting up as the next CEO, got involved in the scandal in the United Kingdom on bugging people and such, and bribing the police to get information on victims and a number of disgusting things. But after a very short time of penance, James is brought back in not only to the fold but to run the whole organization. And the other son is brought in from Australia, running operations there. So they're the dual heir apparents, with James being the guy that will be number one.
By the way, it's also significant that they're coming to the United States, because while Rupert Murdoch likes to complain in the Wall Street Journal and on Fox about the terrible American taxes, all three of the Murdochs are locating in the United States because it results in significantly lower taxes for them.
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