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The Nevada commissioner has been ousted Rupert Murdoch effort to change the family trust to cede full control of his media empire to his eldest son, Lachlan, to ensure that Fox News maintains its conservative editorial board.
In a sometimes scathing decision filed Saturday, Commissioner Edmund J. Gorman Jr. found that the father and son, who currently run Fox News parent Fox Corp and News Corp, acted in “bad faith” in their attempts to amend the irrevocable trust , The New York Times registered.
As currently written, the family trust would share control of the powerful right-wing media empire – which includes New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and several other British and Australian newspapers – between Murdoch’s four eldest children following the death of the 93-year-old mogul.
Gorman argued in his judgment that the proposal to review the trust was little more than a “carefully crafted charade” to “permanently entrench Lachlan Murdoch’s executive roles” within the Murdoch empire, and failed to consider “the effects that such control would have across companies or beneficiary” of the family trust.
Adam Streisand, Rupert Murdoch’s lawyer, said The Times that they are disappointed with the decision and intend to appeal.
With the trust remaining unchanged, it sets up a possible scenario where the remaining three heirs – James, Elisabeth and Prudence – could potentially outvote Lachlan for control of the major media conglomerate, although Lachlan currently runs both Fox and News Corp.
While Prudence was least involved in the family business, Rupert at various times considered choosing Lachlan, James or Elisabeth to succeed him. Over the past few years, and with James and Elisabeth known to have more moderate political views than their father and older brother, Rupert has tried to capture the right wing of Fox News and his other media holdings by positioning Lachlan to take control.
The effort to strip the other three children of all voting power and keep Lachlan at the top began in earnest in the middle of last year. At the time, according to court documents, the children began discussing a strategy behind the scenes for dealing with their father’s death, prompted by an episode of the HBO series. Inheritance when fictional family patriarch Logan Roy dies suddenly.
Below initial trust agreementwhich was to be binding, the voting shares would be divided equally among the four eldest children after Rupert’s death. This was due to negotiations with Rupert’s second wife Anna – mother of James, Lachlan and Elisabeth – who was concerned that her ex-husband’s younger children with his third wife, Wendi Deng, would be given equal voting power. Prudence is Murdoc’s first child with his first wife, Patricia Booker.
With a provision in the trust giving Rupert the right to make changes as long as he acted in the best interests of all beneficiaries, Lachlan and his father sought a way to change the arrangement to consolidate Lachlan’s power. It also sought to marginalize James, who was feared to be plotting a “coup” with Elisabeth and Prudence to oust Lachlan after their father’s death.
In the end, Gorman overwhelmingly sided with Rupert and his eldest son, claiming they had been operating undercover for months and had an ulterior motive to keep Lachlan in power to keep Fox a right-wing operation.
“The effort was an attempt to stack the deck in Lachlan Murdoch’s favor following Rupert Murdoch’s death so that his succession would be immutable,” Gorman wrote. “The play may have worked; but an evidentiary hearing, like a showdown in a game of poker, is where the games collide with the facts and eventually all the bluffs are called and the cards lie face up,” he added.