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LONDON – 21st Century Fox deputy COO James Murdoch is keeping his seat on the board of U.K. satellite giant BSkyB after being re-elected at the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Friday in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Chase Carey, president of 21st Century Fox, which owns a 39 percent stake in the U.K. pay TV giant, is also among the high-profile directors retaining their board seats. He joined the BSkyB board earlier this year.
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James Murdoch has been a BSkyB director since 2003, having served as CEO from Nov. 2003 to Dec. 2007, and then chairman until April 2012. Last year, he became a non-executive director.
He also is 21st Century Fox’s head of international and recently became chairman of German pay TV firm Sky Deutschland, which 21st Century Fox controls. This week, it also emerged that Murdoch has joined the board of youth media company Vice Media, in which 21st Century Fox bought a 5 percent stake this summer.
BSkyB has recently found itself playing down the threat of competition from U.K. telecom giant BT’s sports networks, which has been snapping up TV rights to sports events, including some English soccer league matches, European Champions League soccer rights and a slew of other sports.
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The shareholder meeting also comes as the ongoing phone hacking trial of former News International CEO and News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks and former NOTW editor Andy Coulson continues to occupy headlines in the British media. James Murdoch used to run News International, the former name of News Corp‘s U.K. newspaper publishing division, where the phone hacking scandal erupted.
BSkyB CEO Jeremy Darroch, who was also elected as a board member, delivered a speech on the state of BSkyB on Friday, but the shareholder meeting wasn’t webcast.
Voting figures Friday (Nov. 22) showed that James Murdoch was reelected with 96 percent of the vote.
Just 3.9 percent of shareholders opposed his reelection, compared with 4.98 percent last year.
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