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Saturday, January 23, 2010 - 12:20 AM
Australian-American media baron Rupert Murdoch married Anna Torv in
1967, shortly after his divorce from his first wife and just as he
began the string of international acquisitions which turned the Murdoch
family's News Limited holdings into the international,
multibillion-dollar News Corporation media empire of today. By 1998,
they had three children and Anna held a seat on the board of directors
of News Corp., but Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire increasingly resented her attempts to cement
the succession of control of his media empire to his existing
children. Striking up a relationship with a younger female
employee—which Anna had also been when they had met—Rupert announced
his intent not to retire, to remove Anna from the board of directors, and to divorce.
Things
quickly got ugly. Anna suspected that Rupert's new relationship was
adulterous, and sued for divorce. The absence of a prenuptial agreement
between them meant that nearly all of Murdoch's assets would be
considered community property and would be subject to division by the
courts. Anna now had to focus not only on maximizing her payout from
the divorce, but also on the future of the family estate in light of
the prospect of Rupert's marrying his 30-year-old employee Wendi Deng.
In order to keep Deng and any of her offspring out of the family
business, she made control of the family trusts which controlled News
Corporation the focus of negotiations for the financial settlement. The
settlement which resulted was widely reported to be worth as much as
$1.7 billion, but analysts who follow News Corporation transactions
closely report that the cash settlement to Anna was likely far less, in
the $200 million range. Her true victory was the restructuring of the
family trusts to guarantee control by the children of Rupert's first
two marriages. Rupert married Deng 17 days after his divorce from Anna
was final, and the new couple now has two children. Rupert tested the
new arrangement in 2005 by trying to persuade his older children to
grant voting shares in the trust to his children with Deng. Not
surprisingly, they refused.
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