A committee of British MPs has said Rupert Murdoch is not "a fit person" to run a major international corporation.
In a report into the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee accused the News Corporation chief of exhibiting "wilful blindness" towards the wrongdoing in his organisation.
It said News Corp had been guilty of "huge failings of corporate governance" and that throughout its instinct had been "to cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing and discipline the perpetrators".
The report accused three former senior executives of News Corp's UK newspaper publishing arm News International - Les Hinton, Colin Myler, and Tom Crone - of misleading the committee during its inquiries into the scandal.
It said that Rupert Murdoch's son James had demonstrated "wilful ignorance" about what had been going on, which "clearly raises questions of competence" on his part.
The most damning judgment was reserved for Rupert Murdoch.
"On the basis of the facts and evidence before the committee, we conclude that, if at all relevant times Rupert Murdoch did not take steps to become fully informed about phone hacking, he turned a blind eye and exhibited wilful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications," the report said.
"This culture, we consider, permeated from the top throughout the organisation and speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corporation and News International.
"We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company."
The committee was split on party lines over a number of key findings - including the verdict on Rupert Murdoch - with the Tories voting against and Labour and the Lib Dems in favour.
In response to the report, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp again accepted that there were "serious wrongdoings" at its now defunct News of the World and that it was too slow and too defensive in its response.
But the company criticised what it described as the "unjustified and highly partisan" nature of commentary by several members of the Select Committee at a press conference after the event.
"We have already confronted and have acted on the failings documented in the Report: we have conducted internal reviews of operations at newspapers in the United Kingdom and indeed around the world, far beyond anything asked of us by the Metropolitan Police," the company said in a statement.
