LONDON - A U.K. lawmaker called for News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch to be questioned by police after a secret recording showed him saying that bribery had been routine practice of reporters.

A transcript by the ExaroNews journalism website of a March 6 meeting between Murdoch and about 25 journalists from The Sun newspaper, many of them facing bribery charges, also showed him promising to give “total support” to reporters if they’re convicted. Murdoch told the group that News Corp. had stopped cooperating with the police and “hadn’t given them anything for months.” Murdoch is heard saying, “it’s the biggest inquiry ever, over next to nothing.”

“It’s a disgrace. Here we are, two years later, and the cops are totally incompetent,” said Murdoch, who is executive chairman of News Corp.

In one section of the transcript, Murdoch tells his staff: “payments for news tips from cops: that’s been going on a hundred years, absolutely. You didn’t instigate it.” He said one of the first things he saw when he bought the News of the World tabloid in 1969 was a safe full of money that he was told was for bribes.

“If these tapes are an accurate account of his staff meeting they show that what Rupert Murdoch has said in private is markedly different to his public testimony to Parliament and Judge Leveson,” Tom Watson, a Labor Party lawmaker who has been a leading critic of Murdoch, said in an email. “In particular, he makes the extraordinary claim that he was aware of payments to police.”

Watson said he planned to write to police in the U.K. to request that they interview Murdoch to establish his knowledge of payments to officers, and to U.S. authorities torequest an investigation under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

“Mr. Murdoch never knew of payments made by Sun staff to police before News Corp. disclosed that to U.K. authorities,” the New York-based company said in a statement. “Furthermore, he never said he knew of payments. It’s absolutely false to suggest otherwise.”

“No other company has done as much to identify what went wrong, compensate the victims, and ensure the same mistakes do not happen again,” it said. “Rupert Murdoch has shown understandable empathy with the staff and families affected and will assume they are innocent until and unless proven guilty.” Information for this article was contributed by Robert Hutton of Bloomberg News and by Jill Lawless of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 07/05/2013