Comment: Unsavoury underbelly of the media is exposed

There was a lot of “not recollecting” going on as well as “not being informed”. Bombshell e-mails on apparently rife phone-hacking at the old News of the World went unread. Massive out-of-court payouts go out the door with little more than a nod.

Then there were the close and frequent contacts between News Corp executives and senior government figures during the company’s bid for BSkyB.

Nothing improper in this, but where does the case for business advocacy on one side become blurred with the desire for political support from a media monolith on the other? Disturbing grey areas, and all that.

It was the same thing with News Corp and New Labour when Tony Blair was in his sofa-government saddle before he went on his ex-politician rock tour. At least News Corp is consistent.

Breakfasts, lunches, dinners, drinks, straightforward meetings, ranging from Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne down through Business Secretary Vince Cable and Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

While the relevant government ministry was considering News Corp’s ultimately abortive bid for Sky, the wider administration was hardly putting itself in purdah away from considerable contact with the would-be acquiror.

Lord knows what Lord Justice Leveson makes of parts of the media world, its scruples and interface with power. Yesterday’s evidence would confirm it is a bizarre mixture of chumminess, e-mail carpet-bombing, “private engagements”, cavalier casualness, breach of criminal law, internships for the relatives of bosses and contacts, and alleged bribery of public officials.

Shell’s east African move is a wise one

BY ALL accounts, east Africa is the next boomtown region for gas exploration. Shell’s £1.12 billion agreed offer for Cove Energy, the Mozambique-focused explorer, may provoke an increased offer from Thai state-controlled oil group PTT Exploration and Production (PTTEP).

But they are just the latest international groups to assess east Africa as forming a new hub region for supplying liquid natural gas.

Other energy majors on the ground there include North America’s Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, Japan’s Mitsui, Bharat Petroleum and Videocon of India, Eni of Italy and Norway’s Statoil.

Shell covets Cove’s main asset, which is an 8.5 per cent stake in the Rovuma field off Mozambique, where the operator Anadarko reckons there could be 30 trillion feet of recoverable gas reserves. It is a prize worth going for, particularly given east Africa’s advantageous positioning to supply the still growing economies of Asia.

For Shell, Cove is not just a ticket to the dance in east Africa. It looks a good acquisition, with strong potential, in itself.

But it cannot hurt Shell’s prospects for further asset deals in that region, and the political negotiations they involve, to have such exposure.

Energy exploration is the most political of industries given it has to do with natural and national resources, and if Shell can get the Mozambique authorities onside, as well as Cove’s directors, other deals may be possible.

Don’t read too much into bourses bounce

UK SHARES recovered some of the previous day’s losses yesterday after the new political eurozone turmoil, and the netherlands, Italy and Spain all raised money on the bond markets.

Even the Paris bourse put on a couple of per cent amid fears that the socialists under Francois Hollande are about to sweep to electoral victory in France.

I fear this may be a dead cat bounce. If a deeply austerity-averse new French government falls out of the financial rectitude pact that France and Germany have driven in the past year, there is a real danger the entire euro project goes off the rails. If that happens, banks could hit serious trouble again, and financial markets would be likely to take a battering.

Whatever Nicolas Sarkozy’s faults, he “got” the idea for a cleaning of the fiscal stables. Hollande doesn’t and it is worrying