New evidence of a cover-up of phone hacking at the News of the World has been disclosed in court documents, which show the company created a policy to delete emails which could be used against it in legal proceedings.
The documents, released to The Daily Telegraph by a High Court judge, says the policy’s stated aim was “to eliminate in a consistent manner” emails that “could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation in which a News International company is a defendant”.
Hundreds of thousands of emails were deleted “on nine separate occasions”, computers were destroyed and one senior executive told an underling to remove seven boxes of paper records relating to them from the company’s storage facility.
Clive Goodman, the royal reporter who was jailed for phone hacking in 2007, claimed during an internal employment hearing that "all of the stories" he wrote in his final two years at the News of the World "were based on phone hacking”, the court papers state.
The court document was created by lawyers for a series of phone hacking victims and is based on information they have been provided by News International’s Management and Standards Committee.
It would have been used in any High Court trials had News Group Newspapers, publisher of the now defunct News of the World, not spent millions settling cases out of court.
It includes detailed information about admissions that NGN would have made had the cases gone to trial.
The documents were released following a hearing before Mr Justice Vos at which lawyers for News Group said they were adopting a "neutral" position on whether the papers could be released, but did not raise any objections.
For the first time, it can be disclosed that one reporter, named as Journalist E, carried on intercepting voicemail messages even after the arrest in 2006 of Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who was later jailed.
The reporter was one of at least six News of the World journalists who hacked phones themselves.
However it is details surrounding the cover-up which are the most damning.
The papers state that from 2008 on, the News of the World had a legal obligation to “preserve all relevant evidence” of phone hacking because it had been notified of civil claims that were pending.
But in Nov 2009 it created the “Email Deletion Policy” 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 document includes emails sent from a senior executive which says that all emails prior to January 2010 would be deleted.
A further email to a lawyer at News International asks “how are we doing with the…email deletion policy?
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