Press standards, privacy and libel - Culture, Media and Sport Committee Contents


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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