News Limited attacks ‘laughable’ claims in AFR piracy story as Fairfax swipes back

News Limited has issued an aggressive response to the Australian Financial Review’s story yesterday that claimed that a firm owned by News Limited’s parent company News Corp promoted pay TV piracy in Australia.

A statement from News Limited described the story as “full of factual inaccuracies, flawed references, fanciful conclusions and baseless accusations which have been disproved in overseas courts.”

News Limited claimed that “the notion that alleged NDS actions in Australia were done to undermine Austar so that FOXTEL could bid for it 13 years later are so far-fetched as to be laughable.”

However, the Fin’s editor-in-chief, Michael Stutchbury, countered that he “fully stands by” Neil Chenoweth’s story, saying that report did not suggest that NDS-related piracy in the late 1990s and early 2000s was done “with the purpose of helping Foxtel to buy Austar.”

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