The Met police have requested transcripts of the pre-trial hearings in Prince Harry’s phone-hacking case against Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire, the Guardian can reveal, as fresh calls were made for a new criminal investigation.
The development will raise the hopes among press intrusion campaigners of a potential new investigation into allegations of “perjury and cover-ups” made against News Group Newspapers (NGN), the owner of the Sun.
The case between Harry and NGN was settled on Wednesday, just 14 minutes before the trial was to begin, with the offer by Murdoch’s newspaper company of substantial damages and an apology to Harry and Tom Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labour party, who was a co-claimant.
The admission by NGN of “incidents of unlawful activities carried out by private investigators working for the Sun” was the first time the company had recognised illegality beyond the now defunct News of the World.
NGN continues to deny that phone hacking took place at the Sun, the company’s flagship newspaper, or that its journalists there were involved in criminality. The newspaper was edited by Rebekah Brooks, who is now chief executive at NGN, between 2003 and 2009.
On the steps of the court on Wednesday, the claimants’ barrister David Sherborne had further claimed that the disclosures made by NGN over the five years that the case had been running offered grounds for a fresh police investigation into “perjury and cover-ups”.
Lord Watson has said that he intends to submit a dossier of evidence to the Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley.
The Guardian understands that this file is being compiled by Watson’s lawyers, who intend to submit the evidence within weeks.
Sources close to Harry and Watson said the evidence of criminality by executives at NGN was “almost incontrovertible”. The company strenuously denies this.
The Guardian understands that the Met has been monitoring the civil case and has made a formal application for transcripts of all the key pre-trial hearings in which the evidence was discussed. NGN declined to comment.
A Met spokesperson said: “We are aware of the outcome of the civil proceedings. It remains the case that there are no active police investigations into allegations of phone hacking or related matters.
“We await any correspondence from the parties involved, which we will respond to in due course.”
Last year, the former prime minister Gordon Brown added his voice to calls for a new police investigation over claims that Will Lewis, now the chief executive of the Washington Post, presided over the deliberate destruction of emails at Murdoch’s UK newspaper business when he worked for the company 14 years ago.
There had been disclosures in the high court of a minute of a 2011 meeting between the police and Lewis, who was the newspaper company’s general manager at the time.
Detectives had been inquiring into a complaint by Brown of the mass deletion of emails belonging to senior executives at Murdoch’s newspaper company when police investigations into illegality at the company were continuing.
Lewis justified the deletions of some emails by accusing Brown of “controlling” a plot with Watson, then a Labour MP, to obtain the emails of Brooks through a third party.
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As part of the settlement on Wednesday, NGN confirmed that it now accepted that “this information was false, and Lord Watson was not in receipt of any such confidential information. NGN apologises fully and unequivocally for this.”
On Friday, the actor Hugh Grant reiterated his call for the police to act, saying: “I think what they’re [NGN] terrified of is that those findings would trigger a new criminal inquiry.”
The Met commissioner, speaking to LBC radio, said the force would “reflect” but that a “massive series of investigations” had been done.
Rowley added: “Much of the material in the civil litigation actually came from those investigations and was requested through legal processes by the litigants. So let’s, let’s see whether they produce anything.”
Chris Huhne, the former cabinet minister who settled a phone-hacking case with NGN in 2023, said he had also written to the Met police to demand a further investigation. He said: “They swore under oath at Leveson that there was no criminal activity [at the Sun]. So you know: were they ignorant? Were they incompetent, or were they lying?”
A spokesperson for NGN said: “It must also be stressed that allegations that were being made publicly pre-trial (and indeed post-settlement) that News International destroyed evidence in 2010-11 would have been the subject of significant challenge at trial.
“These allegations were and continue to be strongly denied. Extensive evidence would have been called in trial to rebut these allegations from senior staff from technology and legal.”
Source: theguardian.com
