Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Jan Klimkowski]

You can't make this stuff up.

For our international friends, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is the part of the criminal justice system that the police formally approach, with the evidence gathered during their investigation, to learn whether charges should be pressed or not.

So, in 2006-7, when Lord Macdonald was the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), head of the CPS, the body he led did not pursue the phone hacking investigation.

Now, in June 2011, when the Murdoch empire called him in to "examine" evidence, it took him 3-5 minutes to identify "blindingly obvious" evidence of corrupt payments to police officers.

Oh the tangled games the British deep state plays. :angeldevil:

News Corp board shocked at evidence of payments to police, says former DPP

Lord Macdonald tells committee it took him 'three to five minutes' to decide NoW emails had to be passed to police

Owen Bowcott, legal affairs correspondent guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 July 2011 21.26 BST

"Blindingly obvious" evidence of corrupt payments to police officers was found by the former director of public prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, when he inspected News of the World emails, the home affairs select committee was told.

Explaining how he had been called in by solicitors acting for Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation board, Lord Macdonald said that when he inspected the messages it took him between "three to five minutes" to decide that the material had to be passed to police.

"The material I saw was so blindingly obvious that trying to argue that it should not be given to the police would have been a hard task. It was evidence of serious criminal offences."

He first showed it to the News Corp board in June this year. "There was no dissent," he recalled. "They were stunned. They were shocked. I said it was my unequivocal advice that it should be handed to the police. They accepted that."

That board meeting, the former DPP said, was chaired by Rupert Murdoch.

Lord Macdonald shortly afterwards gave the material to Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick at the Metropolitan police. The nine or 10 emails passed over led to the launch of Operation Elveden, the police investigation into corrupt payments to officers for information.

Lord Macdonald, who had been in charge of the Crown Prosecution Service when the phone-hacking prosecution of the NoW's royal correspondent took place, said he had only been alerted to the case due to the convention that the DPP is always notified of crimes involving the royal family.

Members of the committee were highly critical of the CPS's narrow definition of what constituted phone hacking, claiming that it was at odds with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.