UK cop: Murdoch's The Sun bribed officials

LONDON -- Rupert Murdoch's top-selling British tabloid, The Sun, had a culture of making illegal payments to corrupt public officials in return for stories, a senior police officer said yesterday, as Murdoch announced that the paper's first Sunday edition had sold more than 3 million copies.

Sue Akers, a Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner, told the government's media ethics inquiry that The Sun openly referred to paying its sources and that such payments had been authorized at a senior level.

Her comments came the day Murdoch's company paid former teen singer Charlotte Church $951,000 in a phone-hacking settlement for violating her privacy.

Akers said Sun journalists had paid not only police officers but also military, health and other government officials. One official received 80,000 pounds over several years, she said, and a journalist had been given more than 150,000 pounds in cash to pay his sources. She said payments went far beyond acceptable practices, such as buying sources a meal or a drink.

Akers said "a network of corrupted officials" had provided The Sun with stories that were mostly "salacious gossip." "There appears to have been a culture at The Sun of illegal payments, and systems have been created to facilitate such payments whilst hiding the identity of the officials receiving the money," said Akers, who is in charge of an investigation into phone hacking and police bribery.

Akers did not indicate when or whether the payments had ended. Murdoch insisted that practices at The Sun have changed.

"The practices Sue Akers described at the [Judge Brian] Leveson inquiry are ones of the past, and no longer exist at The Sun," he said in an emailed statement.

Akers made her accusations a day after Murdoch launched The Sun on Sunday, a replacement for his scandal-tainted News of the World. He said the inaugural edition had sold 3.25 million copies,- more than the News of the World averaged before it was closed.