Dinh is on the Board of Directors for News Corporation.
Dinh has a close relationship with Rupert Murdoch.
News Corp. Director Leading Phone-Hack Probe Has Personal Ties to Murdoch
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-06/dinh-s-ties-to-murdoch-under-fire-as-point-man-in-hacking-probe.html
News Corp. (NWSA)’s independent directors, obligated to assess Rupert Murdoch and other top executives’ handling of the company’s phone-hacking scandal, are relying for guidance on Viet Dinh, a board member with personal ties to the Murdoch family.
Dinh, 43, is point man between the independent board members and a panel that New York-based News Corp. (NWS) created to cooperate with authorities probing phone hacking by the defunct News of the World tabloid and to evaluate company standards.
A Washington attorney and Georgetown University Law Center professor, Dinh has been a friend of Chief Executive Officer Rupert Murdoch’s oldest son Lachlan since 2003 and is godfather to Lachlan’s second child. In 1992, a decade before they met, the South China Morning Post, then owned by Murdoch, helped Dinh free his sister from a Hong Kong refugee camp.
“Usually it’s required that an investigation like this is undertaken by a committee of independent directors,” said Jay Lorsch, a Harvard Business School professor who has served on the boards of four publicly traded companies.
“It’s very hard to be objective if you’re involved in any way -- financially or emotionally -- with the family of the chief executive you are supposed to be supervising.”Viet Dihn is representing a former HP director.
Hewlett-Packard spying scandal sheds new light on US corporate “ethics”
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/10/hepa-o02.html
The chairman and a half dozen other top officials have resigned or been fired at Hewlett-Packard, the biggest US personal computer and printer manufacturer, amid a scandal over illegal corporate spying that has unfolded over the past month.
The spying campaign, launched by H-P board Chairwoman Patricia Dunn in response to leaks to the press of internal corporate discussions, included surreptitiously obtaining the phone records of H-P board members and employees, surveillance of board members and journalists, and the emailing of spyware to journalists in an effort to learn the identity of their sources within the company.
Private telephone records on hundreds of cell and home telephones were obtained by a method called “pretexting,” in which investigators made repeated calls to telephone companies, pretending to be the individuals targeted, until they were able to convince a phone company employee to release the information.
And former Attorney General Michael Mukasey's law firm is advising Dinh in News Corp's phone hacking scandal.
News Corp. (NWSA)’s independent directors hired the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, according to Mary Jo White, a partner at the firm and the former U.S. attorney in New York.
Michael Mukasey, who served as U.S. attorney general under George W. Bush, will join White in representing directors, Suzanne Elio, a spokeswoman for the firm, said today.
“Debevoise & Plimpton has been retained to advise Viet Dinh in his supervision of the Management and Standards Committee on behalf of the independent members of the board,” Elio said in an e-mail. She declined to comment further.
News Corp. Independent Directors Hire Debevoise Law Firm
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-19/news-corp-independent-directors-hire-debevoise-firm-s-white-mukasey.html
Dinh, who runs a small law firm in Washington that specializes in damage control, and venture capital executive Tom Perkins are leading the efforts of independent directors, who hold nine of 16 board seats.
Dinh, also a professor at Georgetown University and the chief architect of the USA Patriot Act, represented Perkins, a former Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) director, during a scandal at that company.
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