News Corp taking (tax) shelter. You can take the news out of News Corp, but you can’t take the love of international tax havens, and all the planning that goes with that love, out of the new News Corp. In fact, tax planning and the Murdoch empire should be a compulsory course for Australian investment analysts, not to mention journalists at the Australian arm of the family company, News Ltd.  If such a course existed, journalists would have found a number of subsidiaries of the new News Corp with some exotic offshore addresses — in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Singapore.

All great tourist destinations, but also attractive tax havens where profits can be hidden, sheltered, filtered, and then sent back to the bean counters at Murdoch HQ in New York. Of course, these are only a few of the 100-plus subsidiaries the present News Corp maintains in foreign tax havens. Most will move across to 21st Fox Century Fox. The US Government Accountability Office reported in 2011 that News Corp had 136 subsidiaries in tax havens. These included one subsidiary in Panama,16 in the Cayman Islands and 26 in the British Virgin Islands.

In an act of Murdoch generosity, 21st Century Fox, which owns the Fox Sports trademark in its various permutations, will license these (all illustrated in the May 24 SEC filing) for the sum of $US10 each for the use of the Fox Sports and Fox trademarks in Australian and NZ. Ain’t that generous for a company whose new CEO, Robert Thomson, said this week: “We will be relentless in our cost-cutting and in our pursuit of profits.” So the new News Corp has not only gotten some handy tax minimisation boltholes, but also some cheap (well, costless) trademarks that will be essential to the success and message from the pay TV part of the business, as well as $US2.6 billion in cash. Handy. — Glenn Dyer

Bolt: We are ‘all apes’. Herald Sun firebrand Andrew Bolt today blamed the existence of the AFL indigenous round — a “fashionably racist event” — for the recent controversies over racism in the sport. “Enough,” Bolt concluded. “We are all humans and all apes.”

Stutch spruiks for the Kiwis. Some newspaper editors would try to play down fact they’ve outsourced their subediting operations overseas. Not The Australian Financial Review‘s fearless leader Michael Stutchbury, who has an op-ed in The AFR today arguing the Australian government should follow New Zealand’s economic example.  

Front page of the day. Melbourne’s Herald Sun runs hard on yesterday’s “racist gaffe” made on-air by Collingwood boss Eddie McGuire.