Lachlan Murdoch’s former Australian lieutenant was the “driving force” behind his bruising, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to wrench control of the family empire from his siblings in a bitter succession clash, unsealed documents from a Nevada courtroom show.
The Nevada probate court’s 96-page ruling, made public last week, confirms Siobhan McKenna, Lachlan’s lieutenant, orchestrated a scheme to change a family trust deed to keep control of the family’s outlets including The Australian and Fox News with her boss.
The court documents show how sibling grievances played out within one of the media’s most powerful and famous dynasties. The court case was the culmination of a three-decade succession battle over the future control of News and Fox Corp, prompted by the advanced age of their now-95-year-old father, Rupert Murdoch.
The genesis of “Project Family Harmony” originated with McKenna, who stopped working for Lachlan last year, and Lachlan Murdoch largely on the “false assumption” that his younger brother was fuelling press speculation about what would happen in the event of their father’s death, they reveal.
The plan was to reorganise the Murdoch Family Trust, which held the crucial voting shares controlling Fox News, The Australian and The Wall Street Journal, among other titles.
Before the machinations, in the event of Murdoch’s death, his four votes would be dissolved, leaving each of his four eldest siblings with one vote each, and Lachlan Murdoch fearing he could be pushed out. The planned reorganisation would leave Lachlan in charge, on the basis that he would best safeguard News Corp’s conservative editorial positioning, but a Nevada court rejected that.
While much of the general contents of the ruling had already been aired widely by the press last year, its publication confirms the details and evidence behind commissioner Edmund Gorman’s ruling for the first time.
It confirms the extent to which each central figure was involved and how the plan was initiated, and failed in its attempt to change the terms of the family trust. “The effort was an attempt to stack the deck in Lachlan Murdoch’s favour after Rupert Murdoch’s passing so that his succession would be immutable,” Gorman wrote.
“The play might have worked; but an evidentiary hearing, like a showdown in a game of poker, is where gamesmanship collides with the facts, and at its conclusion, all the bluffs are called and the cards lie face up.”
However, Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch were ultimately succesful in ensuring News Corp would retain its editorial bent, paying James, Prudence and Elisabeth Murdoch $5 billion to agree to forfeit their voting shares in the trust.
“The evidence shows that Project Family Harmony had its origins with Siobhan McKenna and Lachlan Murdoch in the middle of 2023, before Rupert Murdoch was brought into the plan later that year, under the false assumption that James Murdoch was ‘making trouble’ by fuelling press speculation about governance of the MFT after Rupert Murdoch’s passing.”
On Saturday, evidence in the case emerged suggesting Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch believed longtime News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson “lacked vision”, and that they wanted to recombine the company with Fox Corp in 2022 to “elegantly exit” him from the business.
The revelation, reported as part of the unsealed tranche of documents in The Australian Financial Review, emerged from notes from a meeting between McKenna and Jesse Angelo, a business partner of James Murdoch, who was also his best man and a friend since kindergarten.
News and Fox Corp revealed plans to recombine their media businesses in 2022 after the initial split in 2013, although those plans were shelved shortly afterwards.
“There is dissatisfaction from [Rupert Mordoch] on the lack of strategy or vision on the News side,” Angelo claimed in notes of a meeting with McKenna. “They’ve had two billion cash since the split and not doing anything. That’s driving some of this. Fox management would be more proactive in making things happen.”
Angelo left News Corp abruptly in 2019. James Murdoch, his close friend, is on the opposite side of the family split as Rupert and Lachlan.
Thomson was later handed another five-year contract by the Murdochs last year, which will keep him at News until 2030, at least.
In the full ruling, Gorman praised Rupert Murdoch as “the least coached (and perhaps the least coachable)” and “one of the more credible” witnesses despite his advanced age. “Mr Murdoch testified with appropriate recall and, at times, sharp wit,” the commissioner said.
He was less positive about Lachlan Murdoch. After Australian journalist penned a book about Lachlan, the scion “falsely told his father, without proof, that James Murdoch or his associates” were sources for the text, Gorman said, and he did not tell his father that McKenna had actually been heavily involved in the book’s production.
“The evidence shows that, at least with respect to Paddy Manning’s book The Successor, Siobhan McKenna herself had been a significant source, providing over 14 hours of interviews, plus follow-up correspondence,” Gorman said.
Lachlan had previously made attempts to buy out his three eldest siblings – James, Elisabeth and Prudence – in 2019, this masthead reported last year in a Good Weekend profile of McKenna, detailing her rise within corporate Australia and as Lachlan’s consigliere. McKenna’s influence grew over her two decades working for Murdoch and her stature as his fixer led to him entrusting her with the plan to resolve the decades-long succession fight, which had been the influence for the HBO hit program Succession.
Days after the feature was published, McKenna quit News Corp and cut all corporate ties to Murdoch’s Illyria private investment vehicle. She remains chair of Australia Post.
“The evidence shows that it was Lachlan Murdoch’s MD, Siobhan McKenna, who had just been appointed as MD in January of 2022, that was the driving force behind Project Family Harmony until the Special Meeting,” Gorman wrote.
Since the case was settled, James Murdoch has purchased a suite of liberal media assets tied to New York Magazine, emerging as a media proprietor in his own right.
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Calum Jaspan is a media writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based in Melbourne. Reach him securely on Signal @calumjaspan.10Connect via X or email.From our partners
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