Panel Finds No Offenses Took Place at Dow Jones

NEW YORK (Reuters) - No illegal activities have taken place at Dow Jones & Co, the News Corp unit that publishes the Wall Street Journal, according to an independent panel tasked with overseeing the integrity of the newspaper.

The panel said in a statement released on Friday that none of the "London offenses or anything like them have taken place at Dow Jones."

The committee said it was monitoring the situation and that it has been in talks with officials at Dow Jones over the phone hacking scandal that rocked Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and led to several arrests in London.

The panel added that the resignation of Les Hinton, the Wall Street Journal's publisher, is unrelated to activities that have taken place at the newspaper or at Dow Jones.

"Nothing has come to our attention that causes us to believe that (the) resignation of Les Hinton as publisher of The Wall Street Journal is any way related to activities at The Wall Street Journal or Dow Jones or that any of the London offenses or anything like them have taken place at Dow Jones," the panel said in an e-mailed statement.

Rebekah Brooks, the former head of Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper business, was arrested on Sunday in the latest twist of a phone-hacking scandal that has tainted British police and politicians and shaken the tycoon's global media empire.

(Reporting by Liana B. Baker; Additional reporting by Mohammed Abbas in London; Editing by Richard Chang)