Rupert Murdoch has been hit by fresh allegations that a firm used by his company News Corporation used hacking in an attempt to bring down rival businesses in Australia.
A four year investigation by newspaper the Australian Financial Review alleged that a unit within the media mogul's firm used "hi-tech piracy" to gain advantage over their broadcasting rivals,.
The Australian communications minister has called for a police investigation into the matter, while the deputy prime minister Wayne Swan said the allegations were "concerning".
The AFR reported that London's Metropolitan Police were working with the Australian federal police on the probe, however at the time publishing Scotland Yard had not confirmed this.
The AFR reported: The security group was initially set up in a News Corp subsidiary, News Datacom Systems (later known as NDS), to battle internal fraud and to target piracy against its own pay TV companies.
But documents uncovered by the Financial Review reveal that NDS encouraged and facilitated piracy by hackers not only of its competitors but also of companies, such as Foxtel, for whom NDS provided pay TV smart cards.
The documents show NDS sabotaged business rivals, fabricated legal actions and obtained telephone records illegally.
In a statement the Australian arm of the company, News Limited, said the story was "full of factual inaccuracies": "The story is full of factual inaccuracies, flawed references, fanciful conclusions and baseless accusations which have been disproved in overseas courts."
The allegations come days after NDS was also accused of employing a pay-TV piracy website to hack its rival's service and drive them out of business in BBC's Panorama programme.
According to the BBC, NDS, a company who made pay-TV smart cards, funded the expansion of a website set up to distribute codes to enable pirates to access ITV Digital television for free.
The programme claimed that NDS helped Lee Gibling, webmaster of a site called The House of Ill-Compute, gather and distribute codes to access ITV Digital after it was launched as 'ONdigital' in 1998.
NDS was an Israeli startup before it was bought by News Corp in 1992.
The company was recently sold to Cisco for $5bn, netting Murdoch's corporation a large profit.
Its encryption software is now used by a third of all pay-TV companies in the world, and its purchase Cisco's largest acquisition in seven years.