The accusations about me in yesterday’s Crikey Daily are wrong. The facts are:

I spoke to Steven Long from Inside Business
several times while he was preparing his story. On each call I
explained that the shareholder rights plan was adopted in line with a
Board policy, that the policy as it stood would require shareholder
approval to be extended, BUT, that the policy could be changed. This
should have been no surprise; the position had been outlined many times
before in various media and broker reports this year and, specifically,
it was widely regarded as one option if no satisfactory resolution had
been reached with Liberty.

Phillip Spathis from ACSI called me on the Friday of the same week to let me know Michael O’Sullivan had given an interview to Inside Business
and to seek clarification. It was clear from this conversation that
both Spathis and Long were confused. I thanked Phillip for calling and
clarified the position exactly as described above. I then called Steven
Long again to make sure that he understood the distinction between the
policy as it stood and the fact that it was within the Board’s power to
change the policy. If my comments to Steven Long led to a change in his
story this was not readily apparent because what went to air on the
Sunday was the same as what Steven Long described it to me on the phone
on the Friday.

I learned of the Board’s decision to amend the
policy late the following Tuesday evening. There was no prior knowledge
on my part. Even if there had been, my position did not need to be
changed. When News announced plans to extend the plan by changing its
policy last Thursday, I made a statement in response to ACSI’s press
release of the same day, at the request of several reporters. This
statement said: “The company said it would establish a policy and did
so. The company did not say that it would never change the policy. The
Board has decided to change the policy in light of current
circumstances. No agreement has been breached and no promise has been
broken. The plan has been extended until the company can reach a
favourable resolution with Liberty. Instead of being denied a benefit
as ACSI suggests, the change in policy provides further protection for
shareholders.”

I should have added that the extension of the
plan continues to restrict the Murdoch Interests in the same way that
it restricts Liberty. It was made clear to ACSI in October 2004 that
the governance package agreed at the time contained three separate,
distinct but related elements – these were:

a) the changes to the company’s constitution
b) the adoption of a separate Murdoch Interests agreement, and
c) the adoption of a separate Board policy on a shareholder rights plan.

A
request by ACSI in October 2004 to entrench the policy in the company’s
constitution was explicitly rejected by the company at that time.

I
could not have misled Alan Kohler because he did not contact me about
his column of last Saturday. Equally, Crikey could have checked its
story before it ran it if it had bothered to call.

CRIKEY: We
speculated yesterday that Baxter may not have known about the board’s
decision at the time of his comments to Phil Spathis and this appears
to be correct. However, the position still certainly remains confused.
After all, this is what appeared in The AFR last Friday:

Mr Murdoch, when asked in a telephone conference call
whether News Corp had previously stated that it would take the matter
to a shareholder vote, appeared taken off guard and had to be briefed
in whispered asides by aides as he answered:

“Oh, we didn’t say
that, We said, uh, we – what was the phrase we used?…We said the
board would … the board … oh, it was board policy to do it. Yes,
the board – board policy has changed. The board has changed its policy.”