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Second Newspaper Group Under Inquiry in British Hacking Scandal

September 12, 2013 by

“The group does not accept wrongdoing within its business and takes these allegations seriously,” Trinity Mirror, which also publishes the left-leaning Daily Mirror tabloid and Sunday People, said in a statement. “It is too soon to know how these matters will progress, and further updates will be made if there are any significant developments.”

In March, the police said that four Mirror group journalists had been arrested in South London on suspicion of conspiracy to intercept telephone communications. The journalists were not identified by name. Scotland Yard said they were three men ages 40, 46 and 49, and a 47-year-old woman. British news reports at the time said the four were all senior current or former editors, including the editor and deputy editor of the tabloid Sunday People and the former editor and former deputy editor of The Sunday Mirror.

Thursday’s announcement indicates that the police are also investigating whether the employer of the arrested journalists bears corporate responsibility for any wrongdoing.

The hacking scandal has largely embroiled British newspapers in Rupert Murdoch’s empire. In July 2011, Mr. Murdoch closed The News of the World, a tabloid, after disclosures that its employees had hacked into the cellphone messages of a teenager, Milly Dowler, who had been abducted and was later found murdered.

Two former editors and several ex-employees of Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper subsidiary have been charged and trials are expected to start later in the year. All have denied wrongdoing.

The hacking scandal led to an array of investigations, one of which, the Leveson inquiry, concluded that Britain needed a new form of press oversight with statutory underpinnings.

One of the witnesses at the inquiry, led by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, was the CNN talk show host Piers Morgan, who was editor of The Daily Mirror from 1995 to 2004. He told the investigation that he knew no one who hacked phones.

Other witnesses testified that phone hacking was rife at The Mirror, but Mr. Morgan repeatedly testified that it was not and that he knew nothing about it.

The Sunday Mirror, according to recent industry statistics, had a circulation of around one million in August, but The Sun on Sunday, which replaced the shuttered News of the World, led the Sunday tabloid market with sales of 1.9 million, followed by The Mail on Sunday with around 1.6 million.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/world/europe/2nd-newspaper-group-faces-inquiry-in-british-hacking-scandal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Stain From Tabloids Rubs Off on a Cozy Scotland Yard

July 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Inside was a treasure-trove of evidence: 11,000 pages of handwritten notes listing nearly 4,000 celebrities, politicians, sports stars, police officials and crime victims whose phones may have been hacked by The News of the World, a now defunct British tabloid newspaper.

Yet from August 2006, when the items were seized, until the autumn of 2010, no one at the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly referred to as Scotland Yard, bothered to sort through all the material and catalog every page, said former and current senior police officials.

During that same time, senior Scotland Yard officials assured Parliament, judges, lawyers, potential hacking victims, the news media and the public that there was no evidence of widespread hacking by the tabloid. They steadfastly maintained that their original inquiry, which led to the conviction of one reporter and one private investigator, had put an end to what they called an isolated incident.

After the past week, that assertion has been reduced to tatters, torn apart by a spectacular avalanche of contradictory evidence, admissions by News International executives that hacking was more widespread, and a reversal by police officials who now admit to mishandling the case.

Assistant Commissioner John Yates of the Metropolitan Police Service publicly acknowledged that he had not actually gone through the evidence. “I’m not going to go down and look at bin bags,” Mr. Yates said, using the British term for trash bags.

At best, former Scotland Yard senior officers acknowledged in interviews, the police have been lazy, incompetent and too cozy with the people they should have regarded as suspects. At worst, they said, some officers might be guilty of crimes themselves.

“It’s embarrassing, and it’s tragic,” said a retired Scotland Yard veteran. “This has badly damaged the reputation of a really good investigative organization. And there is a major crisis now in the leadership of the Yard.”

The testimony and evidence that emerged last week, as well as interviews with current and former officials, indicate that the police agency and News International, the British subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and the publisher of The News of the World, became so intertwined that they wound up sharing the goal of containing the investigation.

Members of Parliament said in interviews that they were troubled by a “revolving door” between the police and News International, which included a former top editor at The News of the World at the time of the hacking who went on to work as a media strategist for Scotland Yard.

On Friday, The New York Times learned that the former editor, Neil Wallis, was reporting back to News International while he was working for the police on the hacking case.

Executives and others at the company also enjoyed close social ties to Scotland Yard’s top officials. Since the hacking scandal began in 2006, Mr. Yates and others regularly dined with editors from News International papers, records show. Sir Paul Stephenson, the police commissioner, met for meals 18 times with company executives and editors during the investigation, including on eight occasions with Mr. Wallis while he was still working at The News of the World.

Senior police officials declined several requests to be interviewed for this article.

The police have continually asserted that the original investigation was limited because the counterterrorism unit, which was in charge of the case, was preoccupied with more pressing demands. At the parliamentary committee hearing last week, the three officials said they were working on 70 terrorist investigations.

Yet the Metropolitan Police unit that deals with special crimes, and which had more resources and time available, could have taken over the case, said four former senior investigators. One said it was “utter nonsense” to argue that the department did not have enough resources.

Another senior investigator said officials saw the inquiry as being in “safe hands” at the counterterrorism unit.

Jo Becker contributed reporting.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=ca5df33ef907f840915bc116ea4be4fb

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Murdochs Now Say They Will Appear Before Parliament

July 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Earlier in the day, the Murdochs had sent letters to the panel, the Commons Culture Select Committee, refusing an invitation to appear.

The panel responded by escalating the issue, formally summoning them to testify. The panel said it had “made clear its view that all three should appear to account for the behavior of News International and for previous statements made to the committee in Parliament, now acknowledged to be false.”

Mr. Murdoch and his son agreed to testify shortly after the summonses were issued, putting off the question of whether, as American citizens, they could have been compelled to do so. Ms. Brooks, who is a British subject, said in a separate letter earlier Thursday that she would appear before the panel next Tuesday, though she warned that she might not be able to answer detailed questions.

The moves in Parliament coincided with an announcement by Scotland Yard that officers had arrested Neil Wallis, 60, a former editor of The News of the World, the Murdoch-owned tabloid at the heart of the phone hacking scandal. The crisis for Rupert Murdoch erupted early last week with news reports that The News of the World had ordered its investigators to break into the voice mail of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old who had been abducted and was later found murdered. The Murdoch family shut down the 168-year-old Sunday newspaper after a final edition last weekend.

Rupert Murdoch said early Thursday that he was prepared to appear before a separate inquiry, led by a judge, that was announced by Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday. “Having done this, I would be happy to discuss with you how best to give evidence to your committee,” Mr. Murdoch said in a letter released by the committee.

By agreeing to testify, the Murdochs avoided possible parliamentary repercussions. Sir George Young, the leader of the House of Commons, said lawmakers could impose penalties — including imprisonment — if it ruled that people who refuse to testify were deemed to be in contempt of Parliament. But such measures had “not been used for some time,” he said.

“If a witness fails to attend when summoned, the committee reports the matter to the House, and it’s then for the House to decide what further action to take,” he told Parliament, referring to the House of Commons. “There hasn’t been a case of that kind for some considerable time. The House can order a witness to attend a committee. Apparently this hasn’t happened since 1920.”

Parliament’s summer recess is set to begin next Tuesday, and lawmakers would not normally return until Sept. 5.

Separately, the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an investigation on Thursday into allegations that News Corporation journalists hacked into the phones of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, according to people briefed on the matter. They said the investigation was prompted by news coverage of the hacking scandal and by requests from American politicians.

The developments came after a day of high drama on Wednesday. Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation stunned the British political establishment by abandoning — at least for now — its $12 billion bid to acquire the shares of British Sky Broadcasting, Britain’s leading satellite television operator, that it did not already own.

The deal was subject to regulatory review over, among other issues, News Corporation’s integrity. Politicians continued to press on Thursday for Mr. Murdoch to answer what Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg called “big questions” about his companies’ fitness to own British media outlets, which still include The Times of London, The Sunday Times and the top-selling Sun tabloid.

Pressure seemed to be mounting in particular on Ms. Brooks, the chief executive of News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of the News Corporation, who was editor of The News of the World at the time of the hacking. A separate lawsuit was filed this week alleging that phone a second episode of hacking took place while she was editor of The News of the World, as she was when a private investigator working for the newspaper allegedly helped journalists hack into the phone of Milly Dowler. Ms. Brooks has issued an apology to the Dowler family but said she was on vacation when the resulting article ran, and knew nothing about the hacking. 

Sarah Lyall reported from London, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Jo Becker and John F. Burns contributed reporting from London.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/world/europe/15hacking.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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