Exaro
|
Type of site
|
News website |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | New Sparta Ltd. (Jerome Booth) |
| Website | www |
| Launched | October 2011 |
| Current status | Closed down (as of 21 July 2016) |
Exaro was a British investigative news website based in Covent Garden, London, that operated from 2011 until 2016.
Launched in October 2011, Exaro specialised in carrying out in-depth investigations. Its journalistic creed was "Holding Power to Account.” It set out to produce “evidence-based, open-access journalism – not spin, not churnalism, not hacking – just journalism about what should be transparent but isn't."
Exaro was majority owned by the city entrepreneur Jerome Booth.
Booth owns a group of companies called New Sparta. These include the telecoms company New Call, the film finance company New Sparta Films and the film distribution company Icon.
On 1 February 2012 an investigation by Exaro revealed that the UK's Student Loans Company was paying its chief executive, Ed Lester, through a private company, enabling him to reduce his tax bill by tens of thousands of pounds. The day after the story broke the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, Danny Alexander was summoned to the House of Commons for an urgent debate. He announced a review of all civil service contracts.
At the end of the Treasury review more than 2,400 civil servants were found to be making use of "off payroll" contracts that could allow them to minimise tax. Civil servants found to have underpaid tax will have to pay money back with interest and penalties. They could be billed for unpaid tax going back up to six years, as well as penalties of thirty per cent or more of the amounts owed. One accountant estimated that the HMRC could recoup as much as £100 million in unpaid taxes as a result of the crackdown.
Danny Alexander thanked Exaro in Parliament for exposing the scandal.
In partnership with Channel 4 news, Exaro revealed secretly recorded tapes of Rupert Murdoch talking to The Sun journalists, criticising the "incompetent cops" who handled the phone-hacking investigation and promising to take care of any journalist that had broken the law. Murdoch reportedly characterized the inquiry as a fuss over nothing "Why are the police behaving in this way? It's the biggest inquiry ever, over next to nothing." Whilst it was working in partnership with Channel 4 news, Exaro also broke the story that Murdoch was aware for years that his journalists were bribing public officials. On the tape Murdoch can be heard saying that bribery was part of the culture of Fleet Street and that every newspaper did it.
Later on that year Exaro released another secretly recorded audio, this time of News International CEO Tom Mockridge.
...
Wikipedia