Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
1960-1979)
ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER
JOHN YATES
AND DETECTIVE
CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT
PHILIP WILLIAMS
2 SEPTEMBER 2009
Q1960 Rosemary McKenna: It would
not be in the first instance an interview with, say, the editor
or the managing editor?
Mr Yates: No. Looking at the range
of material we are after, it is perfectly normal practice for
it to be on a lawyer-to-lawyer basis or investigation team-to-lawyer
basis, particularly around the sensitivities with confidential
journalist material where the first thing the editor would say
would be, "Please speak to our lawyer".
Q1961 Rosemary McKenna: It just seems
to me most unusual that you would not just go and speak to the
managing editor or the editor and try and establish, you know,—it
does give them some time to consider their answers, does it not,
if you write to them?
Mr Yates: We treat each case on
its merits and this was a case where it would certainly be on
a lawyer-to-lawyer basis.
Q1962 Rosemary McKenna: You did not
consider speaking to the individual who actually signed off the
payments? It was huge sums of money they were being paid. It was
not considered that you would speak to the person actually authorising
those payments?
Mr Williams: Which payments were
these?
Q1963 Rosemary McKenna: To Mulcaire.
Mr Williams: What? His contract
and—?
Q1964 Rosemary McKenna: The total
amount of money that was paid to him, all of that.
Mr Williams: As I understand it,
in terms of the cash payments they had a practice of it was Goodman
who was making the payments.
Q1965 Rosemary McKenna: Yes, he made
it a habit. That was signed off.
Mr Williams: He would be saying,
"I have got this story. I am paying £500", as it
was, "to this person, using a pseudonym".
Q1966 Rosemary McKenna: Yes, but
the overall amount of money that was being paid to this person
was absolutely enormous. Do you not think there would be various
speaking to more senior people about the amount of money that
was being paid?
Mr Williams: Yes, but, again,
what I needed to know was the answer to a lot of the questions
I put in to them: exactly who was he working for, who was he working
to, who were the editors that he was working to, so that then,
when you go to speak to someone, you have a basis for a conversation
and hopefully you have some documents that you can put to them.
Q1967 Rosemary McKenna: You see,
I am getting the impression that you quite happily accepted that
Goodman was taking the rap, if you like, and although he was making
no comment you were charging him, that he was the one who was
saying, "All right, I'll do the time".
Mr Williams: To be fair, we did
not actually know that until the court case, so all the work that
we were doing beforehand, all these decisions around what is it
we want to pursue and are we going to speak to anyone about that,
was entirely before we knew what was going to happen. In many
ways, personally speaking, although it sounds odd, I actually
wish they had gone not guilty because that truly would have presented
all the evidence and it would have been a test of the legislation.
We worked out with counsel and CPS a package and a range of victims
here whereby there was some evidence that was excellent in terms
of absolutely categorically proving that there had been an interception,
and then there was other, less strong evidence, but by inference
you could say what was happening, so all of this package stuck
together. In a way, this was the first time this legislation had
been tested and we were hoping to use this as case law. The fact
that they pleaded guilty meant that none of the evidence was truly
tested. None of this came out in argument. In court both defendants
would have had the opportunity to give their explanation, and
they may well have said something and we may have been a lot wiser
or better informed.
Q1968 Rosemary McKenna: Yes, which
suited the News of the World, did it not?
Mr Williams: Sorry, the last bit?
Q1969 Rosemary McKenna: It suited
the organisation that there is not case law, that all of the evidence
did not come out.
Mr Williams: That is what happened
but I cannot alter that fact. What I would come back to is that
it was absolutely instrumental in making it clear in everyone's
mind that this is illegal; it is criminal and you will go to prison.
That is what it has established and there has been a whole change
in the practices in terms of how voicemail is managed.
Q1970 Paul Farrelly: Just to complete
what I was trying to get at beforehand in terms of other people,
the defence so far has been the one rotten apple defence and nobody
else knew, but there is this mystery of who else the investigation
would have been dealing with on non-royal stories. You say from
your evidence that there are no other journalists where you might
have reasonable suspicion from the evidence you have collected.
In the evidence the court ordered you to hand over to help them
with the Gordon Taylor civil case, as far as you are aware there
would be no evidence there that might give a reasonable suspicion
that other journalists in the News of the World were involved?
Mr Williams: There is no evidence
that we can go forward with in terms of a criminal—
Q1971 Paul Farrelly: No, that is
not the question, there is no evidence. Whether or not you went
forward or chose not to go forward or decided that you would not
go forward, is there any evidence where you might as the police
have reasonable suspicion that other journalists within News
of the World on these particular charges were dealing with
Glenn Mulcaire and seeking transcripts of telephone conversations
that were intercepted in the way that royal staff's had been?
Mr Yates: I think it is fair to
say that there was a whole range of documents seized from Mulcaire's
house which displayed the range of activity he had been up to
as a private investigator. There could have been some blagging,
there could have been all sorts of nefarious means used to get
that information. There is no evidence to take any further. We
were concentrating in 2006 on section 1 of RIPA and that is what
we were looking at.
Q1972 Paul Farrelly: But that is
not my question.
Mr Yates: As I have said previously,
you would expect a private investigator to have a range of information
and material to do with his role. We may not always agree with
it, but that is what they do and there is employment out there
for them. As to how they came by that information, there was nothing
to take us any further forward from an investigation point of
view.
Q1973 Paul Farrelly: Finally, there
is one particular point. From the records and evidence that went
into the civil case pursued by Gordon Taylor there could be no
inference that Glenn Mulcaire was dealing with any other journalists
at News of the World?
Mr Yates: Of course there would
be. There was bound to be.
Mr Williams: He was obviously
working for someone and I do not know who, and there is nothing
in that material that points to who.
Mr Yates: And not necessarily
in an illegal way. It is his job.
Q1974 Paul Farrelly: Just to finish
this off, in this very strident editorial on 12 July after the
original Guardian—and, remember, we already know at least
one case where Goodman himself is directly accessing, using techniques
that Mulcaire has passed over to him—the News of the
World says the following: "So let us be clear. Neither
the police nor our own internal investigations have found any
evidence for allegations that News of the World journalists
have accessed voicemails of any individuals". Strictly speaking,
given what we know about Goodman, that is not true, is it? If
your unused evidence were to find tape recordings, for example,
of conversations between Mulcaire and other people whom you did
not pursue but may very well be journalists, then that would be
doubly untrue, would it not?
Mr Williams: From what you are
asking, there is nothing there that points me to any other journalists
at the News of the World. The only person, if you like,
unfortunately, is Goodman quite clearly taking part in this activity.
Clearly, Mulcaire was under contract to the News of the World
and doing a whole range of things; hence the question I asked
News of the World, "What is he doing for you?".
They say they have no records, so I cannot go any further. Equally,
frankly, Mulcaire was not that organised. In my view he was not
organised at all in how he was doing this. Everything was written.
It was like a flurry of papers everywhere, scrap notes and everything,
so to make head or tail of it there was—and I am merely
making the inference—no organised list in terms of a roller
deck with names and addresses of people that you could go through
and say, "Ah, these are the people who he is working for".
It just did not exist.
Q1975 Paul Farrelly: Could I just
reasonably ask you to have a look at the unused evidence, Assistant
Commissioner Yates, to see whether you might infer from what you
have not used, because it is germane to this inquiry, whether
Mulcaire was dealing with other journalists apart from Goodman,
for instance, tape recording, where there was a journalist who
was apparently a News of the World journalist by the first
name of Ryan?
Mr Yates: I am quite happy to
concede that he had contact with other journalists. That is what
he did. That is his job. What we focus our minds on is evidence.
Q1976 Paul Farrelly: In relation
to this sort of activity.
Mr Yates: In relation to the activity
that we took them both to court for in 2006. It is not our job
to look beyond that. We can only follow the evidence, so I am
happy to concede that he did. Of course he did. I have said so
on several occasions.
Q1977 Paul Farrelly: I have just
got one final line of inquiry. We have debated what constituted
a review and what did not constitute a review, but in your statement,
Assistant Commissioner, as you said, you had been asked to establish
the facts around the inquiry, and in the statement that you made
you said that where there was clear evidence that people had been
the subject of tapping they were all contacted by the police.
Was that true in the case of Jo Armstrong?
Mr Yates: Sorry; I do not know
who Jo Armstrong is.
Q1978 Paul Farrelly: She is the lady
who is the legal adviser of the PFA whose phone was hacked into
as well as Gordon Taylor's.
Mr Yates: I suppose I have heard
her name, by the way. I do not know the detail of that but in
terms of the people about whom we had evidence that they had been
hacked into under section 1 of RIPA and we took to court on, my
understanding is that we contacted all those people. I do not
know whether her phone was hacked into or whether there was a
suspicion her phone was hacked into. That is an entirely different—
Q1979 Paul Farrelly: I think she
is one of the ten where we have established that their phones
had been hacked into.
Mr Yates: I will have to look
into that and come back to you.
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