Post date: Aug 16, 2011 4:49:42 PM
A letter from former News of the World Royal correspondent Clive Goodman alleges phone hacking was openly discussed at editorial meetings.
LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM (FILE - JULY 10, 2011) UK POOL - Phone hacking was widely discussed at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World, according to a reporter who was blamed as the sole culprit, contradicting repeated denials by senior executives and dragging Britain's prime minister back into the scandal.
In a letter written four years ago in an appeal against his dismissal from the tabloid, former royal reporter Clive Goodman said the practice of hacking was openly discussed until the then editor Andy Coulson banned open talk about it.
Tom Watson, the parliamentarian who has most doggedly pursued the scandal, described the letter as "explosive" and said it could be "very damning.""He's (Andy Coulson) taken a back-seat in this inquiry but if it's true that in 2007 he was chairing meetings where they discussed phone-hacking, it's pretty, pretty damning because obviously he was then hired by the Prime Minister in the spring of 2007 to be his director of communications," said Watson.
Coulson, who has repeatedly denied all knowledge of the practice, went on to become the official spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron, a move which took the affair into the political arena and forced the government to turn on Rupert Murdoch after years of courting his favour.
Goodman, who was jailed in 2007 along with private detective Glenn Mulcaire, said he had been told he could keep his job if he agreed not to implicate the newspaper -- but was fired nonetheless after being sentenced to prison.
The committee investigating the hacking scandal said on Tuesday (August 16) it would probably recall James Murdoch to give further evidence after receiving the Goodman letter and statements from other parties which contradicted his previous testimony.
News International, the British newspaper wing of the News Corp media empire, did not deny the accusations made by Goodman.
The Goodman letter added to pressure on senior News Corp executives, after two former News of the World colleagues previously contradicted information given by James Murdoch when he and his father Rupert appeared before the committee in July.
The issue in dispute is how much James Murdoch knew about the hacking, in particular the scale of the problem, when he knew it and whether he was involved in a cover-up.
Murdoch junior said he had not been in possession of all the facts when he approved a large payout in 2008 to English soccer executive Gordon Taylor, who had his phone hacked.
However Tom Crone, News International's former top legal officer, and Colin Myler, editor of the News of the World until it was shut down in July, have disputed this, saying they had previously shown Murdoch a 2005 email which suggested that the problem was more widespread.
"We are in the detail of this cover-up now, we want to know exactly what was said over payments made to victims of phone-hacking and then it's likely we'll invite James Murdoch to come back and respond to that," said Watson.
Whittingdale said on Tuesday the panel was likely to recall James Murdoch to help explain the differences that remained over the accounts of what had happened at the newspaper. He said 80-year-old Rupert Murdoch was unlikely to be recalled.
James Murdoch was not overseeing the newspaper when the alleged offences occurred but he has been accused of trying to bury the extent of the problem.
Critics have argued that the size of the payout, which was 10 times the record amount awarded in a privacy case at the time, was intended to buy Taylor's silence.
"In James Murdoch's written submission he said he had little involvement in the negotiations over the payments to Taylor... the letter from Mark Lewis (lawyer for victims of phone hacking) he said that when talking to company lawyers they told him he was negotiating with Murdoch. We're assuming that's James Murdoch and I'm sure that Mr Murdoch would like to put that matter right at some point in the future as well," said Watson.
In his written response published by the committee on Tuesday, James Murdoch said Myler and Crone had not told him that any wrongdoing extended beyond Goodman and Mulcaire.
Allegations of widespread hacking at News Corp's British newspaper arm, and in particular reports that journalists had used investigators to hack into the voicemails of murder victims, sparked an uproar in Britain that dominated global headlines for almost the whole of July.
It forced the company to close the 168-year-old News of the World, drop its most important acquisition in decades -- the $12 billion purchase of BSkyB -- and accept the resignation of two of its most senior newspaper executives.
Two of Britain's most senior police officers also quit over their failure to properly investigate the scandal and 12 people have since been arrested.