Court documents released to The Daily Telegraph show that on July 29, 2010, an email was sent by an unnamed manager who was anxious to press on with the secret policy of deleting emails that could be “unhelpful” in any future litigation.
It said: “How come we still haven’t done the email deletion policy discussed and approved six months ago?”
Six days later, another email was sent, referring to “email deletion”, and stating that: “Everyone needs to know that anything before January 2010 will not be kept.”
The content of the emails is disclosed in court papers released to the Telegraph yesterday by Mr Justice Vos, the judge who has presided over dozens of High Court damages claims against News Group Newspapers from victims of hacking.
The documents contain highly-detailed allegations that would have been aired in court if any of the claims had gone to trial. So far, more than 50 victims have settled their claims without the need for a trial, including the latest, Charlotte Church, whose settlement will be made public on Monday.
All of the claims have been against NGN, the publisher of the now-defunct News of the World, and Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator jailed in 2007 for voicemail interception.
The court papers suggest that News of the World executives believed the advantages of phone hacking in terms of newspaper sales from the resulting stories far outweighed any risk of litigation.
Read the court documents
It was “calculated…to make a profit for itself which might well exceed the compensation payable to the claimant”.
The documents show that Mulcaire was first hired by the News of the World in 1998, and worked for the newspaper until he was arrested on Aug 7, 2006.
He was paid between £92,000 and £105,000 per year, but also received one-off payments for specific stories, including £7,000 for inquiries into the Professional Footballers’ Association boss Gordon Taylor, whose claim for damages lifted the lid on the true extent of phone hacking.
By 2007, the documents state, executives and lawyers at the News of the World had “clear evidence” of not only phone hacking but also “breaches of national security and corrupt payments to police officers”.
The evidence was contained in around 2,500 emails given to the external law firm Harbottle & Lewis, which was asked to conduct an internal inquiry following the conviction of Mulcaire and royal reporter Clive Goodman in 2007.
From 2008 on, the News of the World had a legal obligation to “preserve all relevant evidence” because it had been notified of civil claims brought by Gordon Taylor and others.
But in Nov 2009 it set up the “email deletion policy” whose stated aim was “to eliminate in a consistent manner across News International (subject to compliance with legal and regulatory requirements) emails that could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation in which an NI company is a defendant”.
The court papers show that if the case against the News of the World had gone to trial, the litigants would have relied in part on a trail of emails dating between May and October 2010 relating to the email deletion policy.
On May 12, 2010, an NI employee sent an email asking “what happens to my emails…with deletion”.
Then came the message of July 29, 2010, saying: “How come we still haven’t done the email deletion policy discussed and approved six months ago?”
Six days later, another anonymous member of staff referred to “email deletion” and said “everyone needs to know that anything before January 2010 will not be kept”.
On September 6, 2010, lawyers for the actor Sienna Miller, who was later paid damages as a hacking victim, wrote to the firm demanding it preserve any relevant material that could relate to her claim.
Three days later, on September 9, an employee in the IT department sent a message to an undisclosed recipient, saying: “If the deletion needs to wait until tomorrow, then that is fine. There is a senior NI management requirement to delete this data as quickly as possible but it needs to be done within commercial boundaries.”
Then came a damning email revealed by the Telegraph yesterday, in which a senior executive emailed a legal officer at News Group asking “how are we doing with the email deletion policy?” on October 7, 2010.
The lawyer forwarded it to a member of the IT team, saying: “Should I go and see [them] now and get fired – would be a shame for you to go so soon?!!! Do you reckon you can add some telling IT arguments to back up my legal ones.”
The court papers state that at least six News of the World journalists – Clive Goodman and others named as A, B, C, D and E, “intercepted voicemail messages using information provided by” Mulcaire.
Journalist A, described as Mulcaire’s “primary point of contact” until July 2005, instructed him to intercept voicemail messages on “at least” 1,453 occasions.
Journalist B, who was his main point of contact from July 2005 until Aug 2006, commissioned him at least 303 times, Journalist C at least 252 times, Journalist D on 135 occasions and Goodman at least 36 times.
After Mulcaire’s arrest, Journalist E continued to intercept voicemail messages.
The material gained from hacking was used to give instructions to Derek Webb, a private investigator, who put 153 people under surveillance including the footballers Ashley Cole, Lee Chapman and Paul Gascoigne, the actress Sienna Miller, the former Sky football presenter Andy Gray and Gordon Taylor.
