Elisabeth Murdoch (businesswoman)

Elisabeth Murdoch (born in Sydney, Australia on 22 August 1968) is a business executive in the British television industry and a daughter of international media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

She is the Chairman and CEO of Shine Limited, a television production company with offices in London and Manchester.

Named for her philanthropist grandmother, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, she is Rupert Murdoch's second daughter and the eldest of three children born of his second marriage in 1967 to former employee Anna Tõrv, a Roman Catholic born in Glasgow, Scotland of Estonian extraction. She attended exclusive schools in New York, at one of which, in true Murdoch tradition, she set up an on-campus television station as a student project. Her two younger brothers, Lachlan Murdoch (born in London, UK Sept 8, 1971), and James Murdoch, (born in Wimbledon, London, UK Dec 13, 1972), were groomed from a young age to eventually play key roles in their father's media company, News Corporation, but Elisabeth was seldom referred to in this context.

Career

After graduating Vassar College, she became manager of program acquisitions at her father's FX Networks, a cable television service based in Los Angeles. Operating as EP Communications, on 22 September 1994 Murdoch and her husband, Elkin Kwesi Pianim, purchased a pair of NBC-affiliate television stations, KSBW and KSBY, in California on a $35 million loan secured by her father. Within 18 months, the couple re-organised and re-sold the stations at a $12 million profit.

Elisabeth Murdoch thereby emerged as an unexpected rival to her brothers for eventual leadership of the Murdoch publishing dynasty. The siblings have risen and fallen in their father's entrepreneurial plans, being dispatched across the globe to acquire experience managing the various Murdoch corporate outposts, yet often moved from one assignment to another without apparent rhyme or reason. She and Pianim moved to England where Rupert Murdoch was running BSkyB after forcing a 1990 merger with BSB. The early years of BSkyB saw a haemorrhage of cash from Murdoch's News Corporation funds. To help turn around the financial fortunes of the company, the respected New Zealand television executive Sam Chisholm was brought on board to manage the day-to-day operations and build the subscriber base, with Murdoch as his second-in-command and de facto apprentice. By the time Chisholm left the company BSkyB was the most profitable company in the UK.

As Managing Director, Murdoch oversaw BSkyB's £12 million sponsorship of the troubled Millennium Dome, to the relief of its Cabinet overseer, Peter Mandelson. But when she brokered her father's £623.4 million bid for England's champion Manchester United team, the non-Murdoch media cried foul. It was up to Mandelson to decide whether to refer the proposed purchase to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission for investigation. He was openly accused of being too much in the political debt and too much under the personal sway of Elisabeth Murdoch to heed the public's evident desire to scrutinize the deal with an eye toward killing it. In the end, Mandelson did just that, however, and predictions that Elisabeth Murdoch's blonde beauty would distract him seemed ludicrous later that year when he was outed as homosexual by Matthew Parris.

After quarreling publicly with Chisholm, Elisabeth Murdoch veered out on her own as a television and film producer in London. She founded Shine Limited in March, 2001, with 80 percent ownership retained by herself, 15 percent by Lord Alli, and five percent by BSkyB. BSkyB signed a deal guaranteeing to buy an agreed amount of Shine programming for two years. Shine Limited is also a supplier of franchise television to broadcasters internationally, including the BBC, Channel 4, HBO and the RTL Group. Her firm has worked closely with Freud Communications on a number of media deals.

Lachlan Murdoch, formerly the deputy chief operating officer at the News Corporation and the publisher of the New York Post, was deemed Murdoch's heir presumptive before resigning from his executive posts at his father's company at the end of July 2005. That surprise departure left James Murdoch, chief executive of the satellite television service British Sky Broadcasting since November 2003, as the only Murdoch scion still directly involved with the company's operations, though Lachlan agreed to remain on the News Corporation's board. Still, Elisabeth Murdoch cannot be eliminated as a possible successor to choice portions of her father's enterprises.

Family

Her first marriage was to fellow Vassar graduate Elkin Kwesi Pianim, an associate in the corporate finance department of New York investment bank Rothschild Inc. He is the son of Netherlander Cornelia Pianim and Ghanaian economist/financier, A. Kwame Pianim. The lavish wedding on 10 September 1993 was held at St Timothy's Roman Catholic Church near the Beverly Hills residence of the bride's parents. A noted social event, Rupert Murdoch gave the bride away at the altar, and Pianim's African relatives were garbed in traditional Ghanaian robes.

Murdoch and Pianim have two children, Cornelia (born 1994 in New York), and Anna (born 1997 in London). they divorced in 1998. She is now married to Matthew Freud, the son of former MP Sir Clement Freud, and great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud, the millionaire head of Freud Communications, was considered a Wunderkind in the world of British public relations as shaped earlier in the twentieth century by his cousin Edward Bernays, and something of a bad boy by London society, which remembers his youthful arrest for possession of cocaine and marijuana. Murdoch and Freud have two children of their own, Charlotte Freud, born 17 November 2000 and Samson Murdoch Freud, born January 13th, 2007. The couple wed on 18 August 2001 in a (no-press-allowed) ceremony at Blenheim Palace. They receive much media attention as one of the United Kingdom's best-connected 'power couples'.

Elisabeth Murdoch's parents, Anna and Rupert Murdoch, separated acrimoniously in 1998. Anna Murdoch received a settlement of some reported $1.7 billion in assets, to which her own three children were the primary heirs, in addition to whatever share each might eventually receive from Rupert Murdoch's estate. Seventeen days after the divorce, on 25 June 1999, Rupert Murdoch, then 70, married Wendi Deng, then 30, a newly appointed vice-president of Murdoch's STAR TV. Anna Murdoch was also remarried, in October 1999, to banker William Mann. Elisabeth Murdoch, while her own first marriage was dissolving, made jocular reference to familial divorce in a speech at the time.

Rupert Murdoch has since had two children with Wendi: Grace (born in New York 19 November 2001) and Chloe (born in New York 17 July 2003). There is reported to be tension between Murdoch and his oldest children over the terms of a trust holding the family's 28.5 percent stake in News Corporation, estimated in 2005 to be worth about $6.1 billion. Under the trust, his children by Wendi Deng share in the proceeds of the stock but have no voting privileges or control of the stock. Voting rights in the stock are divided 50/50 between Murdoch on the one side and his children of his first two marriages. Murdoch's voting privileges are not transferable but will expire upon his death and the stock will then be controlled solely by his children from the prior marriages, although their half-siblings will continue to derive their share of income from it. It is Murdoch's stated desire to have his children by Deng given a measure of control over the stock proportional to their financial interest in it (which would mean, if Murdoch dies while at least one of the children is a minor, that Deng would exercise that control). However it does not appear that he has any strong legal grounds to contest the present arrangement, and both ex-wife Anna and their three children are said to be strongly resistant to any such change).

See also

• Elisabeth Murdoch (philanthropist), her grandmother

External links

• [1] Shine Limited official homepage.