Yesterday brought some very interesting news from both ‘across the pond’ and here in the US. From the UK, there was the news of the arrests of former News Corp head honchos Rebekah Brooks, who ran Murdoch’s newspaper holdings in Britain, Andy Coulson, former editor of the now defunct News of the World. Dominic Rushe, writing in the Guardian, quoted the FCPA Professor who said it “would be hard for the Department of Justice [DOJ] and the Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] to ignore. We have been hearing allegations for a year and a half now, now we clearly have charges against high ranking officials at a foreign subsidiary.” More ominously, Rushe cited to a report from The Daily Beast that the “Daily Beast alleged that the Murdoch tabloids the Sun and the New York Post may have made payments to a US official on American soil in order to obtain a photo of a captive Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi leader, in his underwear.” Rushe did note that “News Corporation has denied the claims.” But we will leave a more detailed discussion of the events for a later post.

The second piece of news was almost as breath-taking. As reported in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Hewlett-Packard (HP) wrote down $8.8bn of its $11bn purchase value of the UK Company Autonomy. HP said “that an internal investigation had revealed “serious accounting improprieties” and “outright misrepresentations” in connection with U.K. software maker Autonomy.” Further, according to HP Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Meg Whitman, “”There appears to have been a willful sustained effort” to inflate Autonomy’s revenue and profitability. This was designed to be hidden.” Speaking more bluntly (as always) Francine McKenna, in her post entitled “Hewlett-Packard’s Autonomy Allegations: A Material Writedown Puts All Four Audit Firms On The Spot”, in forbes.com said “That’s PR-speak for fraud.”