CAIRO (dpa) – Britain's Sun newspaper was on Monday accused by police investigators of operating a “culture of illegal payments” to public officials in exchange for information. The charge was made by Sue Akers, a senior Scotland Yard officer leading the inquiries into alleged corrupt payments by the newspaper to officials. Her accusations come just a day after Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Sun, launched a new Sunday edition of the newspaper in the hope of drawing a line under a phone hacking scandal that in July forced him to close the News of the World Sunday tabloid. The new newspaper, of which 3.25 million copies were sold Sunday, replaces the News of the World. Akers, whose team is charged with trawling through millions of emails to search for evidence of the corruption allegations, said her findings suggested that payments had been made to officials in “all areas of public life.” She told a judicial inquiry into the scandal: “There also appears to have been a culture at The Sun of illegal payments and systems created to facilitate those payments.” The payments of “significant sums” had been regular and frequent, and were “often hidden” by concealing the true recipient. They had been authorized “at senior level” by executives at News International, the British arm of Murdoch's global media empire, she said. Akers said that, in one instance, a source had been paid a total of 80,000 pounds (126,000 dollars). “One arrested journalist has over several years received over 150,000 pounds in cash to pay his sources,” she added. Ten Sun journalists, a number of police officers, a defense ministry official and a soldier have so far been arrested in the course of the investigation. All have been bailed. BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/EqL7k Tags: Murdoch, News of the World, phone hacking scandal Section: Business, Latest News
