Rebekah Brooks set to return as News Corp’s UK chief

Rebeak Brooks expected to be appointed as the chief executive of News Corp's UK branch, a year after being acquitted of criminal charges in the News of the World phone hacking scandal

Rebekah Brooks is set to be re-appointed as chief executive of News Corp's UK branch
Rebekah Brooks is set to be re-appointed as chief executive of News Corp's UK branch

Rebekah Brooks is set to return to News Corp as chief executive of its U.K. division, four years after resigning from the post amid the phone-hacking scandal at the now defunct British tabloid News of the World.

News Corp, owned by  said that it in talks with Brooks, and the Financial Times claims that her re-appointment could be confirmed next month.

“As we’ve said before, we’ve been having discussions with Rebekah Brooks, and when we have any announcements to make, we’ll be sure to let you know,” News Corp said in a brief statement.

Meanwhile, Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service said on Friday that it is reviewing a police referral related to possible criminal “corporate liabilities” in the long-running investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World.

A spokeswoman for the CPS, often the final arbiter of whether to bring criminal charges in the UK, said it had received a file from London’s Metropolitan police.

Such a referral is standard procedure in a case as high profile as the News of the World hacking scandal, which the Metropolitan police began investigating in 2011. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the police had determined they found evidence of criminal wrongdoing. News Corp declined to comment on the referral of the file to the CPS.

Brooks, 47, rose through the ranks in 14 years, from the most junior newsroom position to the editor of the UK’s biggest selling newspaper. She resigned in July 2011, amid revelations that NOTW journalists had illegally intercepted voice-mail messages to obtain stories.

The scandal broke out in 2006, when the NOTW’s former royal editor Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire admitted to hacking the phones of thousands of people. However, continuous revelations by The Guardian eventually led to police launching a wider investigation that culminated in the jailing for 18 months of the paper’s ex-editor Andy Coulson.

Brooks was arrested as part of the investigation, and charged with forming part of a conspiracy to hack into phones, of authorising illegal payments to public officals and of trying ot hinder police investigations.

She was acquitted of all charges in June 2014 after an eight-month trial and has maintained that she didn’t have knowledge of phone hacking during her tenure as editor.