Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Jan Klimkowski]

This Sunday morning, The Observer (sister paper of The Guardian) published the suggested questions below for the Select Committee to ask Rupert & James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks.

That Committee has now been overtaken by events, but fwiw here are those suggested questions:

MPs on the culture, media and sport select committee are likely to follow two main tracks in their questioning on Tuesday of Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks: did you have knowledge of illegal activity; and are you now genuinely committed to exposing it? For the MPs, the task is not simply to ask questions, but to confront the witnesses with the evidence which is already available. Here are some possible questions.

Rupert Murdoch
In the apology you published in national newspapers on Friday, you said that you regretted not "sorting things out" faster. But you don't say why it took you so long. Are you saying that you didn't know that:


In September 2002 the Guardian published a detailed 3,000-word story describing how the News of the World and other papers had been buying confidential information from a network of corrupt police officers run by a private investigator called Jonathan Rees.

In March 2003, Rebekah Brooks, who had just spent three years editing the News of the World, told the culture committee that "we have paid the police for information in the past".

In April 2005, the News of the World was identified in open court as a prime customer of the private investigator Steve Whittamore, when he pleaded guilty to paying a civilian police worker to illegally obtain confidential information from the police national computer.

In December 2006, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) published What Price Privacy Now? in which it revealed that 23 journalists from the News of the World had been among the "customers driving the illegal trade in confidential personal information" by paying the network of "blaggers" run by Whittamore.

In January 2007, at the trial of the NoW's royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, and the paper's full-time private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, counsel for the crown said explicitly that in hacking the voicemail of five non-royal victims who were named in court, Mulcaire's purpose was not to give the information to the royal correspondent but "to pass it on to the News of the World".

During the same trial, that counsel for Mulcaire confirmed that "this information would have been passed on not to Mr Goodman I stress the point but to the same organisation. Any material would have gone to them."

And, during the same trial, the prosecution disclosed that Mulcaire was not the only private investigator on the payroll of the News of the World and that the paper was paying other "research companies" even more than they were paying Mulcaire.

Did none of this alert you to the possibility that something might be wrong? Did you at any stage ask any questions about any of these public disclosures?

When the Guardian disclosed in July 2009 that News Group had paid more than £1m to settle legal actions brought by Gordon Taylor and two associates, you told Bloomberg News that the payments had not been made: "If that had happened, I would know about it."

Was that correct? If not, why did you say it? If it is correct that your son did not tell you that the company had made these payments, can you explain why he would choose to conceal that from you?

James Murdoch

In your statement of 7 July this year, you said: "The paper made statements to parliament without being in full possession of the facts." But isn't it also that the paper was in possession of some very significant facts which it failed to disclose to parliament?

For example, on 20 June this year, the company passed to police a collection of emails written by NoW journalists. The former director of public prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, has examined them and concluded that they contain evidence of indirect hacking of voicemail, breaches of national security and serious crime. Some of those messages were written by Goodman and Coulson, both of whom left the paper in January 2007.

Do you accept that in March 2007, when the then executive chairman of News International, Les Hinton, gave evidence to the culture committee, the company was certainly in possession of those messages and failed to mention anything at all about them? Can you explain why he failed to mention them? Could that failure reasonably be described as a "cover-up"?

Also in your statement of 7 July this year, you said: "The company paid out-of-court settlements approved by me. I now know that I did not have a complete picture when I did so. This was wrong and is a matter of serious regret."

We know that you paid out-of-court settlements in the cases of Taylor and Max Clifford. Were there other settlements which you approved before News Group publicly admitted liability in April this year?

You say you "did not have a complete picture". Do you agree that in the case of Taylor, the judge had ordered that your company be shown various items of evidence, which led you to settle the case, including:

Invoices submitted by Glenn Mulcaire to the NoW, which identified various public figures as his targets, including Tessa Jowell and John Prescott.

An email from a NoW reporter sending transcripts of 35 intercepted voicemail messages to Mulcaire for the attention of the NoW's chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck.

Detailed records kept by Steve Whittamore of his dealings with the NoW, which identified 23 of the paper's journalists by name that is more than half of those working for news and features commissioning several hundred potentially illegal searches relating to named targets.

It was this evidence which persuaded your company to settle the case. Was this not enough of a picture to show you clearly that your claims that Goodman had acted as a "rogue reporter" were clearly untrue; that other identifiable reporters were involved in handling illegally intercepted voicemail; and that other identifiable reporters were involved in handling illegally obtained confidential data?

Why did you not make any attempt to go back to parliament, to the Press Complaints Commission and the public to warn them that your company's previous statements were clearly false? Note that it is no excuse to say that your settlement with Taylor was confidential. That would not have prevented you revealing that you now had unspecified evidence which proved that the "rogue reporter" story was untrue.

Doesn't this pattern of behaviour look like a cover-up?


The civil actions

Why is your company paying for Mulcaire to appeal against a court ruling that he should answer questions about the hacking he did for the NoW?

Why is your company spending millions of pounds settling the civil actions being brought by public figures before evidence can be used in open court? Why not allow the facts to be disclosed in the public domain before settling?


Rebekah Brooks
When you were editor of the News of the World, were you aware that more than half of your news and feature reporters were paying Whittamore to use his network of blaggers to obtain confidential information?

Were you aware that your news editor, your features editor and your Scottish news editor were among those using this network? Do you remember using him yourself? The paperwork seized from his office by the ICO records you asking him to "convert" a mobile phone number into an owner's name and address.

Were you aware that Whittamore was submitting invoices to the NoW which explicitly requested payment for apparently illegal acts?

When you were editor of the NoW were you aware that your news editor, Greg Miskiw, was authorised to give a full-time contract of employment to Mulcaire?

When you were editor of the NoW, what did you do when you were told by three senior officials at Scotland Yard that one of your executives, Alex Marunchak, had used the paper's resources on behalf of two murder suspects to spy on the senior detective investigating their alleged crime?

The Guardian has disclosed that the surveillance of Det Supt Dave Cook involved the NoW in physically following him and his young children, "blagging" his personal details from confidential police databases, attempting to access his voicemail and that of his wife, and possibly sending a Trojan horse email to steal information from his computer. Did any of this come as a surprise to you, or were you told this by the police while you were editor?


When you were editor of the NoW, you published a story which referred to a message left by a recruitment agency on the voicemail of Milly Dowler, the 13-year-old schoolgirl, who was then missing without explanation. Did you read that story? Did it occur to you to question how your reporter could have known about this message?

Surrey police, who were investigating Milly Dowler's disappearance, were provided with information about that voicemail by the NoW. Was that done without your authority? Are you confident that Surrey police have no record of your being involved in the decision to tell them about that voicemail?


When you were editor of the Sun, you published confidential medical information about the illness being suffered by Gordon Brown's infant son. Did the Sun obtain that information directly or indirectly from a health worker? Did the Sun pay a health worker or anybody related to a health worker for that information or for a story related to that information?