Published under “Street of Shame”

AFTER the phone-hacking scandal shamed News International and shut the News of the World, Rupert Murdoch promised to cleanse the company. And lo, his lawyers at NI have duly produced The Blue Book, a summary of 61 “compliance policies” – which seem designed to absolve the company of wrongdoing while dumping staff in the doo-doo.

Compliance policies are the bastard brainchildren of company lawyers. By setting out detailed rules of staff conduct – regardless of whether or not these rules can be followed in practice – a company shifts the burden of legal liability from itself on to its staff.

Compliance wonks 
All NI employees have been issued with The Blue Book, ordered to study it from cover to cover and dragged to compulsory sessions with compliance wonks to have the word hammered home. (One memorable decree at these meetings was that nicknames were henceforth banned. Clearly the Dirty Digger has had enough of his moniker.)

But the book alone doesn’t give much away: the real meat is in the 61 policies, housed on a password-protected website. If the prospect of memorising all the sub-clauses within these policies wasn’t enough, the website warns that any breach could land you in court – in New York.

One policy in particular, on making cash payments, has raised eyebrows. Foreign correspondents sometimes need to slip someone, perhaps a fixer or a soldier, some cash to secure safe passage away from a war-torn frontline or across a border. To stay within the letter of the NI law when making a potentially life-saving payment, hacks are now obliged to follow a convoluted ten-step process.

The nearest cashpoint
 First they must gain approval from their line manager (probably a few thousand miles away in Wapping), who in turn must then find the editor or deputy editor to countersign the request; the managing editor or deputy managing editor must then approve it, too, after which funds will be sent to the hack’s bank account. The correspondent withdraws the money from the nearest, er, cashpoint – and then has to sign a form confirming receipt of the funds.

Unfortunately for anyone failing to abide by this process, if such a payment was deemed to be a bribe, NI, thanks to the careful work of its lawyers, would be able to step aside and let the hack take the bullet.

For more on this story go to:

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=street_of_shame&