© MICHAEL KEMP / ALAMY

● Rupert Murdoch’s company was required to preserve evidence of illegal voicemail interception. Instead, it erased NEARLY 31 MILLION EMAILS!

● Now new claims of its astonishing attempt at a coverup are coming to light

The autumn of 2010 was a tough time for the News of the World. For more than a year, the Guardian had been exposing the crimes committed by some of the newspaper’s journalists. On 1st September, the New York Times published new evidence including a devastating on-the-record interview with the former showbusiness reporter Sean Hoare implicating his editor, Andy Coulson, in phone hacking.

On 6th September, the pressure intensified when actor Sienna Miller threatened to sue the newspaper. In her letter before action, Miller’s lawyer, Mark Thomson, identified other senior journalists who were alleged to have been involved as well as Coul- son and—crucially—Thomson put the newspaper on notice that it must preserve any evidence that could be relevant to the case.

Nevertheless, over the following weeks, Rupert Murdoch’s UK company, News Group Newspapers (NGN), supervised the deletion of more than four million old emails, incidentally wiping out almost all of Hoare’s career at the paper. The company removed from the newsroom nine boxes containing paperwork and audio recordings—none of which has ever been seen again—and then went ahead with a programme to destroy dozens of old computers, including those used by all of the journalists who were named in Miller’s claim.

We now know this and a great deal more about what the Murdoch company was doing as its crimes were being exposed because, since the climax of the scandal 10 years ago, key figures have changed sides and given sworn evidence; and a stream of victims have sued, forcing the company to disclose a wealth of internal records. Some of the new evidence has been deployed in open court, where it is available to be reported. Almost all of it has been overlooked by Fleet Street. This article lays out some of the new evidence in the context of the facts that previously emerged through select committees, the courts and the Leveson inquiry.

Much of the new evidence deals with allegations of the concealment and destruction of evidence. Documents submitted to court by the claimants suggest that, as the hacking victims and the police closed in, the company indulged in “fraudulent conspiracy, and/or dishonesty, bad faith and sharp practice”.

We can now see in fine detail how, in the five months after Miller issued her threat, wave after wave of deletions wiped some 30m emails from the company servers; all the emails and the hard drive of Murdoch’s UK chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, were destroyed or lost; some evidence was removed from a room in Murdoch’s HQ in east London where police had stored it until they had time to examine it; and other evidence was hidden in a secret underfloor safe in Brooks’s office.

Court papers allege that named executives including Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Brooks went on to mislead or lie to parliament as well as to the inquir y—led by Lord Justice Leveson— that was established once the scandal came to light to examine the culture, practices and ethics of the press. The Murdoch company lawyers do not admit to this allegation.

It is important to say that while the Murdoch company has now settled with more than 1,300 claimants and paid out an estimated £1.2bn in damages and professional fees, it continues to insist that it has not engaged in any destruction or concealment with the intention of covering up crime. It says that the deletion of emails was necessary because the servers were overloaded; paperwork and other material was cleared out in the natural course of running a crowded newsroom; computers were due to be destroyed and replaced because they were moving to a new building. It denies making any statements that it knew to be false and accuse some claimants of trying to misuse the courts “as a vehicle for wider campaigning interests against the tabloid press.” In a statement to Prospect, a spokesperson for the Murdoch company said the claimants’ allegations “have nothing to do with seeking compensation for victims of phone hacking or unlawful information gathering and should be viewed with considerable caution not only in relation to their veracity but also in the light of those who are behind them. Lawyers for the claimants work with a group of former phone hackers and employ anti-press campaigners and activists who seek to use the compensation claims to make allegations in circumstances they are protected in doing so [sic] by open justice principles.”

Sienna Miller’s legal threats apparently kickstarted waves of email deletions at the Murdoch company

The evidence is clear that, from at least 1994, when its journalists first started using criminal methods to obtain information, the Murdoch company hid the wrongdoing behind a wall of secrecy. The claimants have uncovered 37 different aliases which were being used in internal records to conceal the identities of private investigators (PIs) who were potentially breaking the law for the News of the World.

Some of them were paid routinely in cash via branches of Thomas Cook. The PI who led the phone hacking, Glenn Mulcaire, was disguised as “Paul Williams”, “John Jenkins” and “Mr Alexander”. His contract dishonestly specified only lawful work, and his generous retainer payments were separated from his identity by diverting the money through five different front companies.

There was asimilarly devious approach to concealing the work of Dan Evans, a professional reporter who was hired to hack in addition to Mulcaire. He eventually cooperated with police and described, for example, how, having accessed avoicemail which Sienna Miller had left for Daniel Craig, he was told by his editor, Andy Coulson, to record it on an audio cassette and then to post the cassette from outside the building back to the newsroom, so that they could pretend it had simply arrived uninvited from an unknown source.

During the first decade of the News of the World’s crimes, the new evidence suggests that the secrecy was jeopardised just once, in April 2004, when a London law firm directly challenged the paper on behalf of two clients to disclose “any ‘PIN’ or other numbers allowing access to our client’s voicemail”. The paper’s legal department settled the case out of court, and the company then concealed the paperwork for 16 years, until—finally—it was forced to disclose it to the claimants in May 2020.