Australia's commercial radio regulator is to investigate the prank call that was followed by the apparent suicide of a nurse at King Edward VII hospital, which was treating the Duchess of Cambridge for acute morning sickness.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) has the power to revoke the licence of 2Day FM, the station involved, or to impose conditions on how it operates. It does not have the power to fine a station or to remove presenters from radio programmes.
Acma has said it is using its discretionary powers to launch the investigation. Under normal circumstances it waits until a licensed station has completed its own investigation.
The results of an autopsy on Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse found dead in the wake of the prank call controversy, are due on Thursday.
Scotland Yard said the cause of Jacintha Saldanha's death would be released after a Westminster coroner's court hearing.
Saldanha answered the phone when two Australian disc jockeys rang up the hospital where the duchess was being treated. Mel Greig and Michael Christian, who were impersonating the Queen and Prince Charles respectively, later broadcast the call, which included confidential details about the duchess's condition. Saldanha was found dead three days later.
Acma will consider whether 2Day FM's prank call breached the Commercial Radio Codes of Practice, including whether it breached standards of decency, invaded privacy or broke rules of consent.
Under part 6 of the code stations are not allowed to broadcast the words of an "identifiable person" unless the person has been told in advance that their words may be broadcast. If they have been recorded without their knowledge they must give consent for their words to be broadcast before they are put to air. Legal experts have said they believe the call may have breached the code of conduct as well as the listening devices act in the state of New South Wales.
Rhys Holleran, the chief executive of Southern Cross Austereo, which owns 2Day FM, said the station tried on five occasions to contact the hospital before the call was broadcast. The hospital denied this.
"Following the hoax call, the station did not speak to anyone in the hospital's senior management or anyone at the company that handles our media inquiries," the hospital said in a statement.
2Day FM has had two licence conditions imposed in the past three years by Acma. The first followed an on-air incident in 2009 in which a 14-year-old girl was strapped to a lie detector and questioned by her mother about whether she was sexually active. The mother volunteered to quiz her daughter despite apparently already knowing the girl had been sexually assaulted.
When the girl said she had been raped when she was 12, shock jock Kyle Sandilands, who presented the show with Jackie O'Neil, asked: "Right, and is that the only sexual experience you've had?" The interview ended after O'Neil stepped in and she and Sandilands apologised.
Acma found that the station had breached standards of decency and ordered it to implement staff training programmes.
In 2012 another licence condition was imposed after Sandilands insulted a female journalist for reporting the low ratings of a TV show that he and O'Neil had presented.
"Some fat slag on [the media website] news.com.au has already branded it a disaster," he said. "You can tell by reading the article that she just hates us and has always hated us. What a fat, bitter thing you are. You're deputy editor of an online thing. You've got a nothing job anyway. You're a piece of shit."
Acma made the code's decency requirement a condition of 2Day FM's licence for a period of five years. The requirement says "programme content must not offend generally accepted standards of decency".
