Court orders private investigator to divulge identity of executives who commissioned him to hack Steve Coogan's phone
Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the News of the World phone-hacking case, has been ordered by the high court to reveal the names of executives who commissioned him.
The court ruled that Mulcaire, whose contract with the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid was worth �100,000 a year, could not refuse to answer questions about his work on the grounds of self-incrimination.
In legal actions brought by the comedian Steve Coogan and the former Sky Sports presenter Andy Gray, Mulcaire must now respond to inquiries about the names of News of the World journalists who ordered his services and the identity of celebrities whose phones were hacked.
Coogan is suing Mulcaire and the News International subsidiary News Group for breach of privacy for allegedly hacking into voicemail messages left on his mobile phone.
Mulcaire has already admitted passing phone intercept information to several individuals working on the News of the World news desk.
Delivering judgment, Mr Justice Vos accepted that there was now "abundant evidence that Mr Gray's voicemails were intercepted and a strong inference that some misuse will have been made of the confidential information thereby obtained."
He added: "The 12 calls that have already been proved may well not be the whole story."
In terms of revealing the identities of the News of the World journalists who instructed them and the extent of Mulcaire's target list, the judge ruled that the convicted private investigator must answer virtually all the questions submitted by Coogan's and Gray's lawyers.
"These requests are relevant," Vos said. "It is alleged that [the News of the World and Mulcaire] were intercepting telephone voicemail on an industrial scale.
"It will be important to the claimant's case to establish the pattern of the ... interception activities. The general practice that Mr Mulcaire adopted in taking instructions from and reporting to journalists in admitted cases will... be relevant to the existence of the conspiracy alleged.
"The identity of the other targeted names and the people who helped identify those names and the manner in which it was done will be relevant to the conspiracy between News Group Newspapers [owners of News of the World] and Mr Mulcaire."
Mulcaire, he said, could not rely on "the privilege against self-incrimination" to refuse to respond to the questions. Only one request put by the claimants was disallowed on the grounds that it constituted a "fishing expedition".
Vos granted Mulcaire's lawyers leave to challenge the ruling on self-incrimination in the appeal court. The judge, however, refused permission to appeal over the issue of identifying Mulcaire's other victims.
Mulcaire was jailed in 2007, along with the News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman, for hacking into phones belonging to staff at Buckingham Palace. Mulcaire received a six-month sentence, while Goodman was sentenced to four months.
Lawyers for the Metropolitan police have claimed so many messages are being examined by the force's phone-hacking inquiry that it is difficult to identify every mention of a celebrity's name among "hundreds of intercepts".
The proliferation of legal actions generated by complaints against the News of the World is also in danger of congesting the courts with "parallel claims", the judge hearing applications for disclosure in three other cases has suggested.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/feb/25/phone-hacking-case-mulcaire-coogan
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