Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Magda Hassan]

Senior police officer 'misled parliament' over phone hacking

Labour MP Chris Bryant says John Yates wrongly claimed it was difficult to secure phone-hacking conviction.

• James Robinson and Nick Davies
  
• The Guardian, Friday 11 March 2011 John Yates, who has been accused by a Labour MP of misleading parliament over the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA One of Scotland Yard's most senior officers was accused of misleading parliament in evidence he gave to a select committee about the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World.
  Labour MP Chris Bryant told the House of Commons that assistant commissioner John Yates wrongly claimed it was difficult to secure phone-hacking convictions because the Crown Prosecution Service adopted a narrow definition of the legislation outlawing the practice.
  Speaking during a Commons debate on phone hacking, Bryant said the CPS told the Met five months ago that Yates's evidence was misleading and warned it against relying on that interpretation of the law. Bryant said he could name eight MPs who have been told by Scotland Yard they were targeted by Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator employed by the News of the World, but didn't identify them.
  Yates told the home affairs select committee in September 2009 the CPS relied on a narrow interpretation of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which meant a crime was only committed if a voicemail is intercepted by a third party before it has been listened to.
  "It was on that basis and only on that basis that Yates was asserting there were only really eight to 12 victims," Bryant said. "Yates maintained time and time again there were 'very few victims'. We now know that to be completely and utterly untrue."
  The CPS has since made it clear that a criminal offence may have been committed whenever a voicemail is intercepted, even if it has already been listened to by its intended recipient.
  Bryant said Yates' claim about the CPS advice "was the very reason, and the only reason, why the Metropolitan police refused point blank to reopen the case until January this year. Yates misled the committee, whether deliberately or inadvertently. He knew the number of potential victims is and was substantial."
  The shadow Europe minister added that Yates wrongly told MPs in September last year there was no evidence that former deputy prime minister Lord Prescott had his phone hacked.
  Prescott was told by the Met in January that his phone messages may have been intercepted by Mulcaire, following its decision to reopen its investigation into phone-hacking. He claimed that further evidence would shortly emerge proving that a journalist at the Sunday Times, another Rupert Murdoch-owned paper, was hacking into mobile phone messages.
  Bryant alleged that the practice of hacking was rife when Rebekah Brooks, now chief executive of the titles' parent company, News International, was editor of the News of the World. News International denies this.