Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Jan Klimkowski]

New moves by British parliament to shield the Murdochs

By Robert Stevens
30 July 2011

On Friday, members of Parliament's Commons Culture Select Committee voted against recalling News Corporation Chairman James Murdoch to give more evidence on phone hacking and police corruption. Labour MP Tom Watson had called on Murdoch, the son of international media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and two ex-News of the World executives, former editor Colin Myler and the newspaper's ex-legal manager Tom Crone, to appear.

Meanwhile, in the time and space created by these pathetic non-investigations, the Murdoch Empire's sub-contracted shredder is working overtime.

Phone hacking: News International mass-deleted emails, tech firm says

HCL reveals News International's various requests for deletion but tells MPs it knew of nothing untoward

Patrick Wintour, political editor guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 August 2011 14.48 BST

The technology firm HCL has told the home affairs select committee it was aware of the deletion of hundreds of thousands of emails at the request of News International between April 2010 and July 2011, but said it did not know of anything untoward behind the requests to delete them.

HCL has sent the letter to the home affairs select committee chairman, Keith Vaz , revealing it had been involved in nine separate episodes of email deletion.

HCL says it is not the company responsible for emails on the News International system that are older than a couple of weeks. It says another unnamed vendor is responsible, but confirms it has co-operated with this vendor in deleting material.

Through a letter from HCL's solicitors Stuart Benson, the firm says: "My client is aware of nothing which appeared abnormal, untoward or inconsistent with its contractual role." It adds: "It is entirely for News International, the police and your committee as to whether there was any other agenda or subtext when issues of deletion arose and that is a matter on which my client cannot comment and something you will no doubt wish to explore direct with News International."

It stressed that since it was not the company that stored News International's data "any suggestion or allegation that it has deleted material held on behalf of News International is without foundation".

HCL identified three sets of email deletions in April 2010, including a deletion of a public folder of a live email system that "was owned by a user who no longer needed the emails".

A further 200,000 emails stuck in an outbox were deleted in May 2010 to restore email functionality. In September 2010 a further pruning of historic emails occurred to help stabilise the email archival system, which had been having "frequent outages" since November 2009.

In January 2011 HCL was asked about its ability to truncate a particular database in the email archival systems. HCL "answered in the negative and suggested assistance from the third party vendor". HCL stated no reason as to why it was unable to assist.

In February 2011 emails were deleted in an older version of Microsoft. Finally, in July 2011 HCL helped delete emails from the live system as relocation errors had occurred during migration from one system to the other.

HCL said it did not have the resources to review every set of deletions.