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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.
