Nick Davies's Blog, page 20

March 11, 2011

Jonathan Rees: private investigator who ran empire of tabloid corruption

News of the World paid £150,000 a year to man who obtained information from corrupt police and illegal sources

The money came pouring in. Jonathan Rees worked from a dingy office in south London. He lived in a cramped flat upstairs. He was divorced, overweight and foul-mouthed but his business was golden: he traded information. His sources may have been corrupt. His actions may have been illegal. But the money kept coming – from one golden source in particular. As Rees himself put it: "No one pays like the News of the World do."

There was only one problem with Rees's lucrative business. He had caught the eye of Scotland Yard's anti-corruption command who strongly suspected that he was paying bribes to various serving officers and, with great care and some skill, they had managed to place a covert listening device inside his office.

It was that bug which recorded him gloating about the pay he received from the News of the World. It also recorded the vivid detail of an empire of corruption, run with casual ease by Rees and his business partner, Sid Fillery – and liberally greased with cash from the News of the World and other Fleet Street titles. The News of the World alone was paying him more than £150,000 a year.

The listening device was placed in Rees's office in mid-April 1999. It did its job for only six months. In that short time, it provided one highly revealing chapter in a long tale of promiscuous criminality. Further chapters were provided by three other private investigators, all of whom worked separately for the News of the World, all of whom finally ended up in court, all of whom were publicly linked with illegal news-gathering.

Over the following years, the Guardian published a lengthy exposé of Rees's involvement with corrupt police and the procurement of confidential information for the News of the World; the Sunday tabloid's assistant editor is believed to have been arrested and accused of paying bribes to police and other key workers, although he was never charged; the paper was named in a London court as the paymaster for the purchase of information from the police national computer; Rees was jailed for a conspiracy to frame an innocent woman and then accused of conspiracy to murder.

And yet the man who became the prime minister's media adviser, Andy Coulson, has always maintained in evidence to parliament and on oath in court that he knew nothing of any illegal activity during the seven years he spent at the top of the News of the World. The entire story unfolded without ever catching his eye. In the same way, the prime minister and his deputy were happy to appoint Coulson last May to oversee the communication between the British government and its people, even though they were already fully aware of all the essential facts.

It begins with the bug. It is commonplace for journalists to interview police officers, but the listening device recorded Rees routinely paying cash directly or indirectly to serving officers, a serious criminal offence. By April 1999, Rees had been working for Fleet Street for several years, and he had created a vibrant network of corrupt sources.

The bug recorded the sound of Detective Constable Tom Kingston from the south-east regional crime squad collecting cash for himself and for his mate who was an intelligence officer involved in the protection of the royal family and other VIPs. DC Kingston sold Jonathan Rees a Special Branch report disclosing police knowledge of an Albanian crime gang in London, Police Gazette bulletins which listed suspects who were wanted for arrest, and threat assessments in relation to the terrorist targets his mate was supposed to be protecting. Rees sold them to newspapers – primarily the News of the World, the Sunday Mirror and the Daily Mirror.

DC Kingston eventually ended up in prison for selling a huge quantity of amphetamine which he had stolen from a dealer. But Rees had other links to other corrupt officers. His partner, Sid Fillery, was a former officer who had connections all over the force. The bug recorded their relationship with Duncan Hanrahan and Martin King, who had left the Metropolitan police to work as private investigators and who were similarly well connected until both were jailed in relation to police corruption. Hanrahan also admitted conspiring to rob a courier of £1m at Heathrow airport.

Some of what they sold was tittle-tattle: a disparaging remark made by Tony Blair about John Prescott within earshot of a bent officer; gossip about the sex lives of Buckingham Palace servants. But some of it was highly sensitive. When one of Britain's most notorious criminals, Kenneth Noye, was finally arrested, Rees bought and sold details of the secret intelligence which had led to his capture as well as the precise time and route by which he would be driven from prison to court. When the TV journalist Jill Dando was murdered on her doorstep, Rees procured a police source so that he could sell live details of the investigation.

And the corruption did not stop with the police. The listening device caught Rees boasting that he was in touch with: two former police officers working for Customs and Excise who would accept bribes; a corrupt VAT inspector who had access to business records; and two corrupt bank employees who would hand over details of targets' accounts. (One of them had the first name Robert and was wittily referred to as Rob the Bank. The other was simply Fat Bob.)

Beyond that, Rees regularly hired two specialist "blaggers" who tricked their way into phone company records to obtain names and home addresses of subscribers and also itemised phone bills, highly valued on Fleet Street as a list of potential sources. One was a Londoner named Shaun who routinely provided lists of phone numbers called by Rees's targets. The other was John Gunning, a private investigator who has since been convicted of blagging the private information of subscribers from British Telecom's database.

Rees's relationship with journalists was a two-way street. An executive from the News of the World developed a corrupt source in the Passport Office who could provide home addresses, personal details and photographs of anybody who applied for a passport. Rees was paying the executive £100 a time for information from the source (although the executive was passing the source only £25 a time).

One person who is familiar with Rees's operations claims that he or one of his associates started using Trojan Horse software, which allowed them to email a target's computer and copy the contents of its hard disk. This source claims that they used this tactic when they were hired by the News of the World to gather background on Freddy Scapaticci, a former IRA man who had been exposed as an MI6 informer codenamed Stakeknife.

Two other sources claim that Rees was commissioning burglaries. One is a private investigator who was told directly by Rees's network that they had broken into targets' home on behalf of a Fleet Street newspaper. The other is a lawyer who claims to have evidence that a high-profile client was the target of an attempted burglary by Rees's associates in search of embarrassing information. There is no independent confirmation of this.

The bug betrayed the sheer speed and ease with which Rees was able to penetrate the flimsy fence of privacy that shields the vast reservoir of personal information now held on the databases controlled by the police and the DVLA, the phone companies and banks. On one occasion, he was asked to find out about the owner of a Porsche. Armed with the registration number, it took him a grand total of 34 minutes to come up with the owner's name and home address from the DVLA and his criminal record from the police computer.

When the Daily Mirror wanted the private mortgage details of all the governors of the Bank of England, Rees delivered.

When the Sunday Mirror wanted to get inside the bank accounts of Prince Edward and the Countess of Wessex, it was equally easy, as the bug recorded:

Reporter: "Do you remember a couple of months ago, you got me some details on Edward's business and Sophie's business and how well they were doing?"

Rees: "Yeah."

Reporter: "And you did a check on Sophie's bank account."

Rees: "Yeah."

Reporter: "Is it possible to do that again? I'm not exactly sure what they're after but they seem to be under the impression that, you know, she was in the paper the other day for appearing in Hello magazine. They think she's had some kind of payment off them."

Rees: "What? Off Hello?"

Reporter: "Um, yeah."

Rees: "… find out how much."

Reporter: "Well, we just want to see if there's been any change to her bank account. "

This would be a breach of the Data Protection Act unless the courts held there was a clear public interest in establishing the health of the countess's business or her deal with Hello magazine. The payment of bribes would be a criminal offence regardless of any public interest. Rees made no secret of his criminality. At one point the police bug caught Rees telling a Daily Mirror journalist that they must be careful what they wrote down "because what we're doing is illegal, isn't it? I don't want people coming in and nicking us for a criminal offence, you know."

But Rees did get nicked – and for a serious criminal offence. The listening device caught him being hired by a man who was getting divorced and wanted to stop his wife getting custody of their children. Rees came up with a plan. Aided and abetted by yet another corrupt police officer, DC Austin Warnes, he arranged to plant cocaine in the car of the unsuspecting woman, so that she could be charged, convicted and smeared as an unreliable parent.

In order to stop that plot, in September 1999, Scotland Yard raided Rees and charged him with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Fifteen months later, he was taken off Fleet Street's payroll when he was sentenced to six years in prison, increased to seven years on appeal. DC Warnes was sentenced to four years.

And none of this was secret. Apart from the case itself, which was held in open court, the Guardian two years later, in September 2002, ran a three-part series on invasion of privacy and devoted some 3,000 words to a detailed account of Rees's dealings with corrupt police officers and of his use generally of illegal methods to acquire information for the News of the World and other papers.

Based on an authorised briefing by Scotland Yard, the Guardian story made repeated references to the News of the World's involvement and quoted an internal police report to the effect that Rees and his network were involved in the long-term penetration of police intelligence and that "their thirst for knowledge is driven by profit to be accrued from the media". The Crown Prosecution Service found that there was no evidence that the reporters involved knew that Rees was acquiring the material by corrupt means.

A year later, in August 2003, Sid Fillery, who was still running the agency and working for Fleet Street, also got himself arrested and charged with 15 counts of making indecent images of children and one count of possessing indecent images. This was reported in national media. He was later convicted.

All of this extraordinary and well-publicised activity around the News of the World nevertheless apparently escaped the attention of Andy Coulson, even though he had been hired early in 2000 to be deputy editor of the paper under his close friend, Rebekah Wade. And Jonathan Rees was not the only private investigator who was routinely breaking the law for the News of the World without Coulson knowing anything at all about it.

All through the late 1990s, the paper had been hiring an investigator called John Boyall, who, among other services, specialised in acquiring information from confidential databases. He had a wiry young man working as his assistant, named Glenn Mulcaire. In the autumn of 2001, John Boyall fell out with the News of the World's assistant editor, Greg Miskiw, who had been responsible for handling him. Miskiw replaced him by poaching Glenn Mulcaire and giving him a full-time contract.

Mulcaire – as the world now knows – proceeded to hack the voicemail messages of public figures. Journalists who worked at the paper say that reporters were routinely and openly hacking voicemail themselves. Some of them were doing it for stories. Some of them were doing it out of idle curiosity. One reporter, for example, was obsessed with Liz Hurley and routinely listened to her messages and to those of her hairdresser or driver or anybody else connected with her. Mulcaire personally hacked voicemail for special projects or when reporters found they could not do it themselves. He also blagged information from phone companies and banks.

Two reporters from that era have spoken on the record. Paul McMullan, who was a deputy features editor, told the Guardian that he had personally commissioned several hundred illegal acts from private investigators and that his deputy editor, Andy Coulson, must have known about it. Sean Hoare, a legendary showbiz writer, told the New York Times, that Coulson, who was then a close friend, had actively encouraged him to hack voicemail and had listened to messages with him. Coulson denies all this.

In January 2003, Coulson replaced Rebekah Brooks as editor of the News of the World. Two months later, in March 2003, they gave evidence together to the House of Commons media select committee and, in answer to a direct question, Rebekah Brooks declared: "We have paid the police for information in the past."

Asked if she would do so again in the future, her answer was pre-empted by Coulson. "We operate within the law and, if there is a clear public interest, then we will," he told the committee. It was pointed out to Coulson that it was always illegal to pay police officers, regardless of public interest. Coulson suggested he had been talking about the use of subterfuge.

Coulson's ignorance, however, was severely tested by an explosive avalanche of disclosure which began that same month when the Information Commissioner's Office raided the home in New Milton, Hants ,of a private investigator named Steve Whittamore and seized a mass of paperwork which turned out to be a detailed record of more than 13,000 requests from newspapers and magazines for Whittamore to obtain confidential information, many of them potentially in breach of the law. Several staff from the Guardian's sister paper, the Observer, were among Whittamore's customers.

In a blue exercise book, Whittamore recorded all his transactions with the News of the World. He identified 27 different journalists as commissioning his work – well over half of the news and feature writers on the paper, spending tens of thousands of pounds. Greg Miskiw alone was recorded as making 90 requests. Whittamore's invoices, submitted for payment by News International's accounts department, sometimes made explicit reference to obtaining a target's details from their phone number or their vehicle registration.

Whittamore had been running a network of "blaggers" – a hell's angel on the south coast who specialised in posing as a British Telecom engineer to trick their call centres into handing over confidential data on subscribers; two employees of the DVLA who sold the details of car owners; an old friend called John Gunning, who specialised in extracting information from phone companies (and who had been one of Jonathan Rees's two specialist blaggers); and John Boyall – the private investigator who had been working directly for the News of the World until he fell out with them in 2001. And Boyall soon became a pivotal figure for the investigation.

Studying Whittamore's paperwork, the Information Commissioner realised that he was also able to buy information from the police national computer. They contacted Scotland Yard, whose anti-corruption command set up Operation Glade and uncovered a chain of links. A newspaper would ask Whittamore for police data; Whittamore would ask Boyall; Boyall would ask a recently retired officer called Alan King; and King would obtain the information from a civilian police worker in Wandsworth, called Paul Marshall, who invented phone calls from members of the public to justify accessing the police national computer.

This led to the arrest of Boyall. Worse still, from the News of the World's point of view, it is also believed to have led to the arrest of the assistant editor who had dealt with Boyall, Greg Miskiw. The Guardian has put it to Miskiw that he was arrested and questioned at Colindale police station in north London, in the presence of a News International solicitor, about allegations that he had paid cash through Boyall to obtain information from the police computer; that he had also authorised the payment of cash bribes to other sources including the employees of mobile phone companies; and that during this interview with police, he exercised his right to make no comment. Miskiw gave no response to these questions from the Guardian.

Miskiw was not charged with any offence. On April 2005, Steve Whittamore and John Boyall – both of whom had worked directly for the News of the World – appeared at Blackfriars crown court with the two men who had given them access to the police computer. All four pleaded guilty to procuring confidential police data to sell to newspapers. The News of the World was named in court as one of their buyers. The case was reported in national newspapers.

2005 continued to throw up incidents which Coulson failed to notice. Crucially, it was now that Jonathan Rees found his way back to the News of the World. In spite of his prison sentence for attempting to frame an innocent mother and in spite of the Guardian's long exposé of his illegal activities on behalf of Coulson's paper, Rees once again was plying his trade and being paid for it from Coulson's budget. He continued to do so until April 2008 when he was charged with conspiring to murder his former business partner, Daniel Morgan, in 1987, a charge which was finally dismissed yesterday at the Old Bailey.

Beyond that, we now know that during 2005, Glenn Mulcaire was being commissioned regularly to hack voicemail. Evidence which has recently been disclosed in court cases suggests that at least three senior journalists were involved in the commissioning: Greg Miskiw, Ian Edmondson and Clive Goodman. Those three men have one thing in common: all of them worked as news editor of the News of the World, raising the possibility that it was part of their job description to commission work from Mulcaire, the only private investigator who worked on a full-time contract for the paper.

If Andy Coulson had failed to notice any of this consistently illegal activity in his newsroom involving Rees, Whittamore, Boyall and Mulcaire; if none of the reporters who worked with these investigators and/or hacked the voicemail of their targets ever mentioned anything to him; if nobody told him there was police activity around his assistant editor, Greg Miskiw; if he failed to ask why the editorial budget had poured hundreds of thousands of pounds into these investigators; if he failed to read any of the news reports that linked his newspaper to Jonathan Rees's corruption or to Whittamore and Boyall's network of blaggers: finally, in the late summer of 2006, the reality caught his eye.

Scotland Yard arrested Clive Goodman, a former news editor then working as royal correspondent, and Glenn Mulcaire. When they appeared in court in January 2007, they pleaded guilty to hacking the messages of eight public figures and were jailed. Coulson resigned insisting that he must take responsibility even though he had never known anything about it.

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Published on March 11, 2011 10:17

March 10, 2011

Senior police officer 'misled parliament' over phone hacking

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

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.

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Published on March 10, 2011 16:11

February 22, 2011

Phone hacking: News of the World editors and Met police meetings

From 2006, meetings took place between senior Met police officers and NoW editors despite the on-going phone-hacking investigation

2006 September: the then Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson – dinner with NoW deputy editor, and Dick Fedorcio, Metropolitan police director of public affairs

2007 November: Stephenson – dinner with deputy editor, and Fedorcio

2008 February: Stephenson – dinner with deputy editor

October: Stephenson – meeting with deputy editor and Fedorcio; Stephenson – dinner with editor, and Fedorcio

2009 February: Stephenson (now commissioner) – dinner with deputy editor and Fedorcio

May: Stephenson – dinner with editor and Fedorcio

June: Deputy Commissioner Tim Godwin – participation in NoW Save our Streets Roadshow alongside Jack Straw MP; Stephenson – attended News Corporation reception; Stephenson – dinner with deputy editor and Fedorcio

November: assistant commissioner John Yates – dinner with editor and crime editor

2010

August: Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick – at request of Stephenson met with deputy editor and chief lawyer of the NoW, together with two detective superintendents, where they were handed material alleging spot-fixing by Pakistan cricketers. This resulted in arrest and searches later that day

June: Stephenson – attended News Corp reception

Criteria

• Must be meetings whose purpose was for Met officers to meet specifically with NoW.

• The Metropolitan Police Authority holds regular briefings and presentations with the Crime Reporters Association, which are events attended by representatives from all national media, including NoW journalists – these are not included in the information provided.

• Social events at which NoW journalists or executives may have been present are not included as they are not hosted by NoW.

• Timeframe is a five–year period, January 2006 to present

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Published on February 22, 2011 08:55

Phone hacking: Senior Met officers dined with News of the World editors

New list shows Scotland Yard officers and editors met for private dinners during the phone-hacking inquiry
• List of meetings

Senior Metropolitan police officers were enjoying private dinners with News of the World editors at the same time as the force was responsible for investigating the phone-hacking scandal, it has been disclosed.

A list of meetings that Scotland Yard has handed over to the Metropolitan Police Authority, which supervises the service, discloses eight previously unpublicised private dinners and five other occasions during which senior officers met with newspaper executives.

Two of the dinners came at particularly sensitive moments and are likely to revive fears that Scotland Yard's handling of the phone-hacking scandal may have been compromised by a desire to avoid alienating the UK's biggest-selling newspaper.

In September 2006, the then deputy commissioner, Paul Stephenson, accompanied by the Yard's director of public affairs, Dick Fedorcio, dined with the NoW's deputy editor, Neil Wallis. This was only a month after officers had arrested the paper's royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, and at a time when detectives were still trying to investigate whether other journalists or executives were involved in the interception of voicemail messages. In theory, Wallis was a potential suspect .

Scotland Yard has since been criticised for failing to interview any NoW employee other than Goodman, even though it is now known that the Met had material that suggested named journalists may have been involved in the hacking. Police also opted not to seek a production order, which would have compelled the paper to hand over internal paperwork, but instead simply wrote to their lawyers requesting a list of information, all of which was refused.

In November 2009, the list also reveals, Assistant Commissioner John Yates dined with the NoW's new editor, Colin Myler, and the paper's crime editor, Lucy Panton, who is married to a serving Scotland Yard detective. Yates had taken over responsibility for the case and, four months earlier, following revelations in the Guardian, he had decided not to reopen the inquiry.

It is not suggested the officers and editors used the dinners to come to any improper agreement. Criticism will focus on the apparent friendliness between the Met as a whole and the organisation that it had been tasked to investigate. MPs have already raised concerns about the fact that the man who headed the original inquiry in 2006, Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman, subsequently worked for the NoW's parent company, News International, writing a regular column in the Times.

The list of meetings was disclosed by Scotland Yard following a request to the deputy commissioner, Tim Godwin, at the Metropolitan Police Authority meeting on 27 January.

The list also discloses that in 2008 and again in 2009, Stephenson had two dinners with Wallis and one dinner with Myler. In 2009, he also attended a NoW reception. Stephenson was confirmed as commissioner in January 2009.

Dee Doocey, a Liberal Democrat MPA member, said: "I find it quite extraordinary that when allegations about illegal phone-hacking relating to the News of the World were still unresolved, that the Met commissioner thought it was appropriate to be regularly dining with the News of the World. Imagine the outcry there would be if the commissioner was seen dining with a member of the public who was the subject of a police investigation."

It is not clear that this is a complete list of all contacts between Yard officers and the NoW.

At the MPA meeting, Godwin agreed to hand over details of "formal or informal meetings with officers on the investigating team and the News of the World". However, the list published today includes only meetings involving senior officers "whose purpose was for MPS officers to meet specifically with News of the World".

The list excludes meetings arranged by the Crime Reporters Association on the grounds that the NoW would not be the only newspaper present. It also excludes meetings at social events that were not organised by the paper. There is no mention, for example, of the Police Bravery Awards in July 2009, when, 10 days after the Yard had elected not to reopen its inquiry into the phone hacking, Stephenson and Yates dined with Rebekah Brooks, then editor of the Sun and the former editor of the NoW, which sponsored the awards.

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Published on February 22, 2011 08:52

February 17, 2011

Phone hacking: police hand over evidence they claimed did not exist

Lawyers for interior designer Kelly Hoppen claim material 'drives coach and horses' through News International's defence

The Metropolitan police have been accused of misleading behaviour in the phone-hacking scandal after handing over evidence they had twice claimed did not exist.

The latest embarrassment for Scotland Yard was disclosed in the high court in the case of Sienna Miller's stepmother, Kelly Hoppen, who claims that a News of the World journalist, Dan Evans, attempted to hack into her voicemail. The court heard she was a tabloid target because of her friendships with the former England footballer Sol Campbell and with Madonna's former husband, film director Guy Ritchie.

The case also threatens to embarrass the NoW because the alleged hacking occurred in June 2009 – three years after the arrest of its then royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, who was jailed with the paper's private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, on the basis that he was the only journalist involved in intercepting mobile phone messages. News International, which owns the paper, has repeatedly said that it does not allow illegal news gathering.

Hoppen's barrister, David Sherbourne, told the court: "This case is enormously important because it drives a coach and horses through the claim that has been persisted in by News International and its executives, that the criminal activities of Goodman and Mulcaire were purely historic, the isolated actions of one rogue journalist and his private investigator associate."

The court heard that Hoppen suspected her voicemail was being intercepted in 2009 because private information was being published while some phone messages were recorded as "old" even though she had not listened to them. After the Guardian disclosed the scale of hacking at the NoW in July 2009, her lawyer, Mark Thomson of Atkins Thomson, wrote to Scotland Yard to ask if the evidence which they had gathered from Goodman and Mulcaire included any sign that Hoppen had been the object of unlawful interception. After three months, the Yard replied that they held no such evidence.

In April 2010, after receiving several alerts from Vodafone about unsuccessful attempts to access her messages, Hoppen's lawyer wrote again to Scotland Yard asking if Mulcaire had held her phone number or other personal details. After a delay of more than eight months, they finally replied in January of this year, once again claiming that they held no such evidence.

But last week, Sherbourne told the court, deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers, who is leading a new investigation into the hacking, had contacted Hoppen to disclose that, in reality, the Metropolitan police had found hand-written notes which were kept by Muclaire detailing her phone numbers and two addresses, her mobile phone account number and the four-digit PIN code which was needed to access her voicemail. "This is the work of a professional hacker," said Sherbourne. Police had now handed over six different pages of Mulcaire's notes about Hoppen which they had been holding since they raided Mulcaire in August 2006.

Sherbourne said it was "regrettable, to put it mildly" that the police had twice denied that this material existed. "It could and should have been provided earlier," he said. "The simple and unavoidable fact is that they misled Ms Hoppen." Edwin Buckett, representing the Metropolitan police, told the court that police had acted in good faith. He said the material taken from Mulcaire was in a chaotic state and some of it was indecipherable.

In March 2010, her lawyers also had obtained a court order requiring Vodafone to hand over material relating to unsuccessful attempts to access her voicemail. This disclosed that on 22 June 2009 – the day after the Mail on Sunday claimed she was having a relationship with Guy Ritchie – her mobile had been called twice by a caller who witheld their own number; hung up the first call when Hoppen answered; then called back, got no answer and dialled into her voicemail for 25 seconds. Vodafone disclosed that the calls were made from a mobile phone registered to News International in the name of Dan Evans, a feature writer.

Mr Sherbourne told the court that in the summer of 2009, past and present News International executives had told a House of Commons select committee that they knew nothing of illegal activity by their reporters. He added: "It was at the very time that News International executives were giving this evidence to the select committee that Mr Evans made his attempts to access Ms Hoppen's voicemail using a News International telephone."

Michael Silverleaf QC, representing Dan Evans, said the evidence clearly showed that Dan Evans had dialled Hoppen accidentally. Evans remembered nothing of the calls. The keys on his phone were inclined to stick and to dial numbers accidentally. The use of his own phone to do something which he knew to be illegal would have been "quite unbelievably stupid". A search of his office and home computers had yielded no sign that he was interested in Hoppen until he was told of the allegation against him. The one occasion on which he appeared to have dialled into her voicemail was "one rogue call which nobody has yet explained", Silverdale told the court.

Mr Justice Eady made an order for Scotland Yard to disclose to Hoppen all relevant material, redacting only the detail of PIN codes. Hoppen has also applied for disclosure orders against Dan Evans and the NoW.

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Published on February 17, 2011 10:51

February 10, 2011

Phone hacking: Prescott says revelations will go a long way

Former deputy prime minister has been named by the Met as a potential victim of phone hacking by the News of the World

Lord Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, has described the revelation by Scotland Yard that he was a potential victim of phone hacking by News of the World journalists as "very significant".

His comments came as it emerged that the reopened police investigation has identified a number of new potential victims.

Just a fortnight after reopening their inquiry, in the wake of an 18-month campaign by the Guardian, police said a re-examination of the evidence they had held for years, but failed to fully investigate, combined with new evidence from the Sunday tabloid, had thrown up an "important and immediate new line of inquiry". The new investigation, they said, had already established "reasonable evidence" that up to 20 people, mainly prominent public figures, were targeted by the paper.

Prescott told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "This is a very big issue, not only for the Met but also the press.

"I want to know all those who have committed criminal acts. What happened before is they decided not to pursue action against people on whom they had evidence that criminal acts had been perpetrated.

"We have got to get a proper reform of the relations between the Metropolitan police and the press.

"I think it is going to go a long way. It doesn't stop at the Met. I think it will go to a lot of newspapers who have been hacking people for a long time."

The development represents Scotland Yard finally beginning to take the lid off the phone-hacking scandal. More than five years after they first started to investigate the illegal interception of voicemail messages by a private investigator working for the News of the World, the Met announced that its new inquiry would:

• Review all the decisions made by their two previous inquiries.

• Contact thousands of public figures who have never been told that their personal details were recorded by the private investigator.

• Warn some public figures that they had previously been misled when they asked the Yard for information.

Police had been dismissive of Prescott's suspicions that he had been targeted, but the head of the new investigation, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, saw Prescott on Wednesday. He was told that invoices recovered by police showed he was targeted by Glenn Mulcaire, the private eye used by the NoW, who was an expert in phone hacking. They also have notes made by Mulcaire about Prescott, who as deputy prime minister was in possession of highly sensitive information. After his briefing by the police chief, Prescott told the Guardian that previous police investigations had been "completely inadequate".

Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Prescott claimed "hundreds" of journalists were involved in phone-hacking, and that "all" newspapers were implicated.

"The papers have been at it for years," he said, adding: "There have been hundreds of journalists hacking phones in all the newspapers."

Prescott suggested that the relationship between papers owned by Rupert Murdoch and the police had hampered the original investigation into phone hacking.

He said: "Since it was a criminal act committed, why didn't the police take criminal action?

"There are a lot of questions now being asked as to why they didn't do that and that is to do with the relationship, frankly, between Murdoch press and the Met police."

The new evidence is understood to show that Prescott was targeted in April 2006, the month he admitted to having an affair with his diary secretary Tracey Temple. In a statement Prescott told the Guardian: "I can confirm that at her request I met Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers today. She informed me that significant new evidence relating to phone hacking and myself had been discovered and that they were investigating it. I think this proves my long-held belief that the original Met police investigation into Mulcaire and News International was completely inadequate and failed to follow all the evidence. I now look forward to the Met police finally uncovering the truth."

Prescott issued his statement as Akers announced that she had contacted other victims whose phones may have been hacked. This is likely to be an alarming development for senior figures at Rupert Murdoch's News International and at Scotland Yard. Numerous journalists who worked for the NoW say hacking was widespread and common knowledge among journalists and executives. Scotland Yard originally presented the case as involving only one "rogue journalist".

The reopening of the inquiry follows evidence being handed over last month by News International. This includes emails sent by Ian Edmondson, the senior editor it sacked last month. Scotland Yard said: "The new evidence recently provided by News International is being considered alongside material already in the Metropolitan Police Service's (MPS) possession … having begun an analysis of the documents seized in 2005 alongside the new evidence, the team have been able to make some links not previously identified.

"As a result, the team have also identified some individuals who were previously advised that there was little or no information held by the MPS relating to them within the case papers and exhibits and this is now being reviewed. At this stage, there is no evidence to suggest that their voicemails were hacked but this will be an important and immediate new line of inquiry." Scotland Yard has been facing an application from Prescott and others for a judicial review of its previous handling of the case. The statement from the Yard appears to reinforce the case for a review. The lawyer making the application, Tamsin Allen of Bindman's, said: "The statement is strongly supportive of our clients' position. We will cite it at the hearing."

Mark Lewis, the solicitor who represented Gordon Taylor in the legal action that first broke open the scandal, said: "[This] is an incredible U-turn by the Met. And it raises questions about statements which were made to the media select committee by assistant commissioner John Yates. He is on record as saying there were only 10 or 12 high-profile victims. That was not correct. He should resign: he misled parliament."

Charlotte Harris, who is suing the NoW and Mulcaire on behalf of numerous public figures, said: "It is a breathtaking about turn by the Met. The confession that individuals were misled is alarming. People have claims and the Met told them that they did not. A full and proper investigation is needed now."

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Published on February 10, 2011 00:56

February 9, 2011

Phone hacking: Lord Prescott named as victim as inquiry widens

Re-examination of evidence held for years combined with new evidence has given 'important and immediate new line of inquiry'

The reopened police investigation into phone hacking by News of the World journalists has identified a number of new potential victims, including Lord Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, the Guardian has learned.

• Review all the decisions made by their two previous inquiries.

• Contact thousands of public figures who have never been told that their personal details were recorded by the private investigator.

• Warn some public figures that they had previously been misled when they asked the Yard for information.

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Published on February 09, 2011 13:00

January 27, 2011

News of the World phone hacking: Nick Davies' email to MPs

Guardian journalist's submission to the home affairs select committee's phone-hacking inquiry, October 2010

To: Select Committee on Home Affairs

From: Nick Davies, The Guardian

Date: October 5 2010

I am a freelance journalist. I work regularly as a special correspondent at The Guardian. I wrote the stories about the secret settlement between Gordon Taylor and News Group which were published by the Guardian on July 9 2009 and which led to new statements about the phone-hacking affair being made by Scotland Yard, the Director of Public Prosecutions and News International; and to new inquiries being opened by the Press Complaints Commission and the House of Commons select committee on media, culture and sport. Since then I have written some 30 further stories on the subject.

In relation to the three areas which you have highlighted for your current inquiry into the unauthorised hacking of mobile phones, I hope the following information may be useful.

1) The definition of the offences relating to unauthorised tapping or hacking in RIPA and the ease of prosecuting such offences

i) I have written several stories which are based on paperwork which is held by the Crown Prosecution Service. This includes detailed records of phone calls, meetings and briefing papers from the original investigation by police into complaints from Buckingham Palace. Some of these records are summarised in a chronology, which was prepared by the special crime division of the CPS on July 15 2009.

The paperwork which I have read includes references to the legal advice provided by the CPS to Scotland Yard and makes no reference to Section One of RIPA requiring the prosecution to prove that an interception of voicemail has taken place before the owner of that voicemail has listened to it him or herself.

For example, following a series of exchanges in which CPS lawyers provided legal guidance to police, a briefing paper was produced on May 30 2006 by the Metropolitan Police for the Attorney General and the Director of Public Prosecutions. This referred to voicemail numbers "being accessed without authority" and to the victims of "this unauthorised access" and goes on to suggest that "it does appear that once the telephone evidence has been secured, the police will have sufficient to arrest the potential suspects." I have read no reference to the unauthorised access needing to occur to messages which have not been read by the intended recipient.

Similarly, after David Perry QC was briefed as Crown counsel, he wrote an email on August 30 2006 to CPS lawyers in which he urged them to make a decision about the scope of the proposed indictment. He stipulated that they needed to prove that voicemail messages had actually been heard by the perpetrators but did not stipulate that they needed to prove that this had happened before the intended recipient had heard them: "The position in relation to this needs to be ascertained as soon as possible because we need to decide what the scope of the case is going to be, whether there are to be any more charges. We also need to look at the indictment to make sure the charges include the interceptions where we can prove that messages were listened to and that there is a balance between the existing three victims."

ii) I obtained a transcript of the hearing on January 26 2007 when Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire pleaded guilty to offences under section one of RIPA. During this hearing, David Perry QC presented the prosecution and included (p 55ff) what he described as 'an explanation of the ingredients of the offences'. The transcript shows that Mr Perry made no reference to the notion that RIPA required the prosecution to prove that the interception had taken place before the owner of that voicemail had listened to it him or herself. Similarly, neither counsel for the two defendants nor the judge made any reference to the notion that the offence under RIPA requires this interpretation.

iii) After publication of the Guardian stories about Gordon Taylor in July 2009, the assistant commissioner for specialist operations at Scotland Yard, John Yates, made a statement on July 9 in which he made no reference to this interpretation of RIPA; and the Director of Public Prosecutions, after reviewing the case file, made a statement on July 16 in which he made no reference to this interpretation of RIPA.

iv) When reference was finally made to this by the DPP, in a memo submitted to the select committee in late July 2006, it was made clear that this interpretation of the law was something that had been mentioned in conversation at a case conference. It had never even been stated in a written opinion: "There was no written legal opinion relating to the interpretation of section 1 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA). Counsel's advice on the ambit of section 1 of RIPA was given to the CPS orally in conference."

v) The same memo from the DPP makes clear that this interpretation of RIPA has been tested in court in relation to the interception of email but not in relation to the interception of voicemail. The memo makes reference to a judgement by Lord Woolf in a case in which Suffolk police requested access to email held by NTL. Two lawyers who specialise in this area have told the Guardian with considerable confidence that that judgement does not have any impact on the use of Section One of RIPA in relation to voicemail. One of them, Simon McKay, author of Covert Policing: Law and Practice, was quoted in the paper reacting to John Yates' claim about this interpretation of RIPA: "That is nonsense and a recurring problem with the police position in this case."

Section One of RIPA stipulates that, for the offence to be committed, the interception must occur when the communication is "in the course of transmission". I understand that it is significant that whereas an old email is stored on the recipient's computer and is no longer being transmitted, an old voicemail is stored on the mobile phone company's computer with the result that whenever a voicemail is intercepted - regardless of whether its intended recipient has already heard it - that interception has to take place "in the course of transmission" from the mobile phone company's computer to the handset.

vi) Specialist lawyers add that even in the event that a court were to accept this interpretation of RIPA in relation to voicemail, the Computer Misuse Act 1998 would continue to make it an unambiguous offence to intercept voicemail regardless of whether or not it had been heard by the intended recipient. Paperwork held by the CPS shows that this act also was the subject of legal advice from CPS lawyers working with the Met police on the original investigation.

vii) It is possible that other evidence to which I have not had access will throw further light on this question. The evidence which I have seen suggests that this interpretation of Section One of RIPA is, at best, contentious; that it was not applied by police or prosecutors in the course of the original investigation and prosecution; and that it was referred to only after the Guardian put pressure on police to reconcile the version of events given in court, which disclosed only eight victims, with the emerging evidence that - in the words of the Met police briefing paper of May 30 2006 - "a vast number" of public figures had had their voicemail accessed without authority.

2) The police response to these offences, especially the treatment of those whose communications have been intercepted

i) Paperwork held by the CPS shows that police began their investigation in January 2006 by analysing data held by phone companies; that this revealed "a vast number" of victims and indicated "a vast array of offending behaviour"; but that prosecutors and police agreed not to investigate all of the available leads.

In addition, the CPS paperwork shows that prosecutors were persuaded by the police to adopt a policy of 'ring-fencing' evidence so that, even within the scope of the limited investigation, there would be a further limit on the public use of evidence in order to ensure that 'sensitive victims' would not be named in court. This appears to have referred to a policy of not naming members of the royal family whose messages had been intercepted. It is not clear whether the ring-fencing extended to the suppression of the names of other potential victims such as senior officers at Scotland Yard.

On August 8 2006, police arrested Clive Goodman, Glenn Mulcaire and one other man who was not finally charged. They seized computer records, paperwork, audio tapes and other material from all three men. As a result of an application by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act in January 2010, we now know that this material included 4,332 names or partial names of people in whom the men had an interest; 2,978 mobile phone numbers; 30 audio tapes which appear to contain recordings of voicemail messages; and 91 PIN codes of a kind which are needed to access mobile phone messages in the minority of cases where the owner has changed the factory settings on their mobile phone.

It has now become clear that, having seized this material, police chose to impose a further limit on their investigation by not fully searching and analysing it. This job was finally done only in the aftermath of the Guardian stories in July 2009. This emerged in written evidence to the media select committee in February 2010 after the Guardian disclosed the fact that the seized material contained 91 PIN codes. The chairman of the select committee, John Whittingdale, wrote to the assistant commissioner, John Yates, to complain that he had not mentioned this when he gave oral evidence to the committee in September 2009. Mr Yates replied that "the specific figure supplied in the FoIA request on January 28 2010 was not available at the time I came before your committee in September 2009."

Further evidence of the decision not to fully search and analyse the seized material also appears in a memo written to government ministers by Mr Yates' staff officer, Det Supt Dean Haydon, on February 18 2010 in which he stated that "minimal work was done on the vast personal data where no criminal offences were apparent".

ii) The decision not to investigate all the leads in the phone data and the subsequent decision not to fully search and analyse the seized material meant that there was a failure to investigate all those who may have been involved in associated criminal activity.

Police chose not to seek a production order requiring the News of the World to disclose internal records. Instead, as evidence to the media select committee disclosed, they wrote a letter to the newspaper asking them for disclosure of a list of items. The newspaper refused to comply, and Scotland Yard accepted this without further action.

Police also chose not to interview any reporter, editor or manager at the newspaper other than Clive Goodman. Emerging evidence about the phone data and other material in the possession of the police reveals that they were in possession of evidence which implicated named employees of the News of the World in dealing with the interception of voicemail messages. It is not clear whether police knew that they had this evidence and chose not to pursue it; or whether their decision not to fully search and analyse the seized material meant that they were unaware of it.

Among this material was an email, sent in June 2005, by a reporter in the News of the World's newsroom to Glenn Mulcaire for the attention of the newspaper's chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck. This email contained transcripts of some 35 voicemail messages taken from the phones of Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, and of Jo Armstrong, his legal adviser. Responding to questions from the Guardian in July 2009, the DPP disclosed that police had never passed this document to prosecutors, even though Gordon Taylor was one of the eight victims named in the indictment. The DPP and police have said that crown counsel 'had access' to all undisclosed material held by police. It is not clear, however, that crown counsel actually ever saw this document. The seized material was so complex and voluminous that it took Scotland Yard officers several months to search it when finally they undertook the task in July 2009. Responding to the Guardian's inquiry, the DPP conceded that crown counsel does not remember seeing it: "He cannot now recall whether the email was the subject of specific advice at the time."

iii) The same decisions which limited the original police investigation of possible offenders also meant that there was a failure to investigate all those who were, or who may have been, victims of voicemail interception.

In terms of the prosecution, this meant that the case was presented on the footing that there were only eight victims. No offences involving other victims were presented to be 'taken into consideration' by the court. Nor were any further offences involving other victims 'left on the file'. Nothing that was said in court or in any public statement by police or prosecutors at the time of the trial indicated that the eight named victims were only a representative sample of a "vast number" of public figures whose voicemail had been accessed without authority.

Separately, there is an issue about the warning of those who were or who may have been victims. In a statement on July 16 2009, following the Guardian's stories, the DPP disclosed for the first time that the eight named victims had been only a representative sample and added: "For any potential victim not reflected in the charges actually brought, it was agreed that the police would inform them of the situation."

In written evidence to the media select committee in February 2010, John Yates suggested that this was indeed what police had done: "What we can say is that where information exists to suggest some form of interception of an individual's phone was or may have been attempted by Goodman and Mulcaire, the MPS has been diligent and taken all proper steps to ensure those individuals have been informed."

However, the emerging evidence suggests that Scotland Yard have failed to honour their agreement with the DPP to inform "any potential victim":

a) There are examples of their failing to inform people at the time of the original investigation even though they were holding clear evidence that Mulcaire had succeeded in intercepting their voicemail. This was conceded in evidence to the media select committee in July 2009 when John Yates said that following publication of the Guardian stories in July 2009, police had informed a small number of victims who had not previously been approached. Even then, however, they failed to complete the task in relation to these confirmed victims. In the case of Jo Armstrong, for example, they had the email of June 2005 which included transcripts of messages taken from her phone. The media select committee asked John Yates when Jo Armstrong was informed. In December 2009, Mr Yates wrote in reply: "Ms Armstrong was not one of the victims selected or named in the indictment to highlight the breadth and scale of those targeted by Mulcaire and Goodman and was therefore never spoken to by the MPS." Scotland Yard continue to refuse to say how many victims were warned at the time of the original investigation and how many have been warned since publication of the Guardian stories in July 2009.

b) A further group of confirmed victims was identified by three of the five mobile phone companies but, contrary to the police agreement with the DPP, many of them were not informed. At the time of the original investigation, Scotland Yard passed Orange, Vodafone and O2 details of the phone numbers being used by Goodman and Mulcaire so that the three companies could search the data which they hold for a rolling twelve-month period in order to try to identify customers whose voicemail had been accessed from those numbers. In February 2010, the Guardian discovered that each of the companies had identified approximately 40 victims; that Orange had warned none of them; Vodafone had warned them 'as appropriate'; and only O2 had a policy of warning all of them. Correspondence from Scotland Yard suggests that they were unaware of the identification of these victims and had made no attempt to ensure that all of them had been informed. It is not clear why Scotland Yard did not also involve the other mobile phone companies in this exercise.

c) Among 'potential victims', where the evidence of successful interception was not so clear, there is evidence of the police engaging in a limited attempt to honour their agreement with the DPP. In written evidence to the media select committee in September 2009, Mr Yates stated that "police led on informing anyone who they believed fell into the category of Government, Military, Police or Royal Household if we had reason to believe that the suspects had attempted to ring their voicemail. This was done on the basis of national security." Scotland Yard continue to refuse to say how many people were approached in each of these four categories.

d) Another group of potential victims appears to have been given less attention. We now know that police found in the seized material 91 PIN codes of a kind needed to intercept voicemail from those targets who have changed the factory settings on their phones. Although the owners of these PIN codes would appear to qualify as 'potential victims', they were not all informed. For example, the actor Sienna Miller, through her lawyer, has disclosed that her PIN code was found in Mulcaire's possession together with her mobile phone number and that Scotland Yard did not inform her until her lawyer wrote a series of letters requesting the information.

e) There is a further category of an unknown number of people whose names and mobile phone numbers and/or other personal data were found in material seized from Mulcaire. These mobile numbers were found in the possession of a private investigator who was specialising in the interception of voicemail messages for a newspaper; the owners of these numbers are public figures; they are the subject of news coverage; they are not the personal acquaintances of Mr Mulcaire; their numbers and other details were found in his work records, not in some personal address book. The police concluded that they were not 'potential victims' and informed none of them. Chris Bryant MP is an example in this category.

f) There is a final category of people whose names were found on invoices recording payments claimed from the News of the World by Mulcaire. The then deputy prime minister, John Prescott, is one of these. He was named on two invoices in the Spring of 2006. Even though Mr Prescott was then in a very senior position in government which meant that he was involved in current matters of defence and counter-terrorism and was in receipt of sensitive political and economic information, police did not approach him to inform him that he had been targetted by a private investigator who specialised in the interception of voicemail messages.

The apparent failure to honour the agreement with the DPP has had some practical results for those victim and potential victims who received no warning. Because mobile phone companies are allowed to hold call data for only 12 months, these people have lost the chance to check to see if anybody had accessed their messages and, if so, who that might be. They had no chance to change their PIN codes to make their messages secure for the future and no opportunity to assess what confidential messages might have been heard.

Following the Guardian stories in July 2009, John Yates ordered officers at Scotland Yard to fully search and analyse the material seized nearly three years earlier, in August 2006. That search led to the creation of a spreadsheet which lists all those named in the seized material together with a summary of the personal information held on them. Scotland Yard chose not to publicise the existence of that spreadsheet and, shortly after it was finally created, at a media briefing in November 2009, a senior officer attempted to deny that it existed and conceded that it did exist only when confronted with detail about it.

Since then lawyers who have contacted Scotland Yard on behalf of clients report that they have received letters which have failed to give them a clear summary of the material relating to them which is in the possesion of the police. I have spoken to several representatives of public figures who were simply misled by the wording of Scotland Yard's letters which led them wrongly to believe they had not been targeted by Mulcaire.

3) Police action to control these offences

The original police inquiry was highly effective in uncovering the truth about the interception of voicemail in the royal household. The jailing of a Fleet Street journalist sent a powerful message to the profession, that this practice was not only unlawful but also dangerous. It is reasonable to conclude that this must have had an impact in reducing the use of illegal techniques in newsrooms.

However, there is evidence that some in Fleet Street have continued to use illegal techniques, including the interception of voicemail. It is reasonable to conclude that the limiting of the original police inquiry sent a contradictory message to those journalists who had been involved in illegal techniques, suggesting that the police had only a limited interest in uncovering these offences.

The evidence suggests that the police continue to take an equivocal approach to enforcing the law in Fleet Street. Scotland Yard have insisted that they will not investigate the mass of unused evidence which they have held since 2006 – the unfollowed leads on the "vast number" of victims found by analysing phone data by May 2006; and the information about potential offenders and potential victims in the material seized from suspects in August 2006.

Instead, they have said they will investigate only "new evidence". And in this, it appears that they have restricted themselves to new evidence which is placed in the public domain by news organisations. For example, they agreed to interview Sean Hoare, who was named in the New York Times as a witness who alleged that the former editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, had encouraged the interception of voicemail; and Paul McMullan, who was named in the Guardian as a witness who alleged that Andy Coulson must have known about the widespread use of illegal techniques at the newspaper.

However, they have not attempted to find their own "new" witnesses and chose to tell their short list of witnesses provided by the media that they must be interviewed 'under caution', ie on the basis that anything they said might be used to prosecute them. Sean Hoare declined to comment on important questions. Paul McMullan refused to co-operate voluntarily with an interview on that basis.

Nick Davies

October 5 2010

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Published on January 27, 2011 03:19

News of the World faces new allegation of phone hacking within last year

Kelly Hoppen, Sienna Miller's stepmother, is suing the NoW for 'accessing or attempting to access her voicemail'

Follow the latest developments in our live blog

The crisis at the News of the World intensified today with the release of new material which confirms that the paper is being accused of attempting to hack into the phone messages of a public figure within the last year.

The material – a high court document and a brief statement from lawyers – shows that Kelly Hoppen, an interior designer who is stepmother to the actor Sienna Miller, is suing the News of the World and one of its feature writers, Dan Evans, for "accessing or attempting to access her voicemail messages between June 2009 and March 2010".

The Guardian has previously reported that Dan Evans was suspended in April last year. Details of the case remain concealed by court orders. However, a senior News International executive has claimed that Dan Evans's defence is that he phoned Hoppen's number for legitimate reasons and accidentally accessed her voicemail when the keys on his phone got stuck.

The News of the World issued a robust statement, saying it had carried out an "extensive investigation led by a team of independent forensic specialists" and "found no evidence whatsoever to support this allegation".

"The civil litigation is ongoing, as is the internal investigation and until both are concluded it would be inappropriate to comment further. However we are disappointed the BBC chose to lead with this misleading report without giving the News of the World an opportunity to respond," the paper added.

The timing of the alleged hacking will cause most concern to Rupert Murdoch's News International. The company has claimed repeatedly that only one of its journalists was involved in the illegal interception of phone messages – the royal correspondent Clive Goodman who was sacked and jailed in January 2007.

The allegation that hacking continued after Goodman's jailing will also cause problems for Scotland Yard. In December, the Guardian disclosed that the Yard had failed for four years to investigate evidence in its possession that the News of the World's private investigator Glenn Mulcaire had targeted the phones of Miller and Jude Law and their friends and family.

A family friend of Miller's said this morning: "If the police had warned Sienna at the time, she would have warned her family, including her stepmother. And if they had pursued the evidence which they had in their hands, they would have discovered that Clive Goodman was not the only journalist involved."

The high court document released this morning is signed by Mr Justice Eady and discloses that in March last year Hoppen successfully applied for an order that required Vodafone to disclose the phone number and other details of a person who had accessed or attempted to access her voicemail. It is believed that Hoppen went to court after receiving an automatically generated security alert from Vodafone warning her that somebody had attempted to change her four-digit pin code.

Eady's summary of the case also discloses that the court issued an injunction forbidding any subsequent attempt to contact Hoppen's phone or use any material obtained from it. "The court was satisfied that the claimant was likely to succeed at trial," Eady writes of the injunction application.

At the time of her original action, Hoppen was suing "a person or persons unknown". However a statement from her solicitor, Mark Thomson of Atkins Thomson, this morning discloses that after Vodafone handed over its data, on 23 July last year, the defendants were identified as Dan Evans and the News of the World's parent company, News International Supply Company.

Evans was suspended in April, after Hoppen's legal action began. In early June, reporters from the New York Times approached News International with questions about his suspension. News International then informed the Press Complaints Commission, which chose not to investigate on the grounds that the case was the subject of a live legal action.

A full hearing in the case is scheduled for 17 February.

In a separate development yesterday, a high court master rejected a request from the News of the World for more time to submit its defence to the case being brought against them by Miller. This case implicated the paper's news editor, Ian Edmondson, in commissioning hacking. Edmondson was suspended in December and sacked yesterday.

Lawyers for Miller argued that the paper had claimed to have run a full internal inquiry into hacking in 2006/7 and that it could not ask for extra time to do so again. The paper was ordered to submit its defence before a previously agreed deadline of 9 February.

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Published on January 27, 2011 00:57

January 21, 2011

Andy Coulson resigns as phone-hacking scandal rocks Downing Street

• PM's press chief stands down over phone hacking claims
• 'When the spokesman needs a spokesman it's time to move on'
• David Cameron denies new evidence is imminent

Andy Coulson, one of the key members of David Cameron's inner circle, has resigned as Downing Street's director of communications, saying the wave of allegations that he was involved in illegal phone hacking when editor of the News of the World made it impossible for him to continue.

"When the spokesman needs a spokesman, it is time to move on," Coulson said in a carefully crafted statement which had been in preparation for 48 hours.

Downing Street insisted his departure was not precipitated by any fresh piece of damning evidence that would undercut Coulson's claim he was unaware that phone hacking was prevalent at the News of the World under his editorship.

Officials said the steady drip of allegations, and the likelihood that they would continue through civil court cases and possible police inquiries, was taking a toll on Coulson's family and making it harder for him to focus.

There was also a suspicion that Rupert Murdoch's News International was losing the will to fend off, or pay off, civil litigants such as the actor Sienna Miller, demanding to know the identity of News of the World executives responsible for authorising hacking of their phones.

If News International continues to fight the civil cases it may appear as if current top executives are involved in a costly cover-up that could damage their professional reputations.

Coulson, who will remain in Downing Street for a fortnight, said: "Unfortunately continued coverage of events connected to my old job at the News of the World has made it difficult for me to give the 110% needed in this role. I stand by what I've said about those events but when the spokesman needs a spokesman it's time to move on."

Coulson is one of the most trusted members of Cameron's inner circle, with an apparent direct line to swing voters and News International. He has been a counterweight to Steve Hilton, Cameron's more visionary director of strategy, and architect of the "big society".

Coulson's departure weakens Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne, who jointly appointed Coulson and have staunchly, sometimes testily, defended him in public and private. Osborne described Coulson as "an incredibly talented, dedicated and patriotic servant of this country".

Cameron said he was saddened by the departure, feeling his communications director was "being punished twice for the same offence. This is all about the past. It has gone on and on and I can understand why he feels the pressure of that.

"I choose to judge him by the work he has done for me, for the government and for the country. He has run the Downing Street press office in a very straightforward professional and competent way."

He said he compared Coulson's regime with "the days of dodgy dossiers, Alastair Campbell, Damian McBride and all that nonsense we had from the past government". He reiterated Coulson's dogged defence, saying his communications director "had resigned as News of the World editor as soon as he found what was happening".

Coulson resigned from the paper in January 2007, the day royal editor Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, were jailed for hacking into the phones of members of the royal household. He insisted the hacking was done by one rogue reporter. Coulson was appointed Cameron's communications director in April 2007 and a subsequent police investigation led to no further action.

The Guardian then published claims that hacking was widespread, and the clouds darkened around Coulson before Christmas when Ian Edmondson, the assistant editor (news) and close to Coulson, was suspended pending an investigation that he had been involved in hacking.

Coulson - who inspires great loyalty amongst those who work for him - was aware that there was little prospect of an end to the allegations, as he faced the threat of further police interviews and civil court cases in which efforts would be made to disprove his defence that he knew nothing about a culture of phone hacking.

Coulson told Cameron of his decision to resign on Wednesday and, after efforts to dissuade him, it was agreed he would announce his departure today, the day Tony Blair was giving evidence to the Iraq war inquiry. A resignation on Thursday would have overshadowed an international summit being hosted by Cameron.

No 10 denied the resignation had been timed to be buried by the Blair cross-examination. Conservative officials said they knew Coulson's departure would be bigger news.

If subsequent court cases reveal Coulson did know that phone hacking was being used to secure stories, Cameron will have to assert he had been misled by his close ally, or admit that he failed to ask pertinent questions of the man that had represented his views to the country for nearly four years.

Tom Watson, the former defence minister who used his seat on the culture select committee to chase down Coulson, said his departure "creates serious questions over the prime minister's judgment and points to the need for a deeper investigation into the affairs of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp". He called on Murdoch to clean up his operation before pursuing his £8.3bn complete takeover of BSkyB.

Murdoch is waiting to hear if his bid will be referred to the Competition Commission.

Watson's remarks were echoed by Chris Bryant, the former Labour minister who is seeking to sue the police over allegations that his phone was illegally hacked for the News of the World. Bryant said:"To say this is long overdue is an understatement. "Cameron has clung on to him for dear life, long past the point when it became clear that Coulson's position was untenable. It is one thing to use Coulson in opposition, but to put him on the taxpayer's payroll at considerable expense and at the heart of government shows that Cameron is completely unscrupulous."

Andy Coulson News of the World phone-hacking scandal David Cameron Newspapers & magazines Conservatives News of the World National newspapers Newspapers Nick Davies Patrick Wintour
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Published on January 21, 2011 11:38

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