Senior journalists at the publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and the People personally hacked the phones of celebrities and spent nearly £2.3m on private investigators, the high court in London heard on Wednesday.
David Sherborne, the barrister for eight phone-hacking victims including the actor Sadie Frost, told the court that high-ranking journalists were not only aware of the unlawful activity but also carried it out.
He added: “We say senior Mirror Group journalists were not only aware of this activity but, as we have discovered since disclosure, were complicit in it as well.”
The allegation came on the second day of the high court civil action brought by eight phone-hacking victims against Mirror Group Newspapers over what Sherborne described as “mass industrial-scale” privacy invasion from 1999 to 2009.
Phone-hacking victims including Frost, the former England footballer Paul Gascoigne and the BBC creative director Alan Yentob are expected to give evidence at the trial later this week.
Sherborne told the judge, Mr Justice Mann, that landline call data and internal emails showed senior journalists, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were personally engaging in phone hacking at the titles.
He added: “This voicemail interception and the blagging of personal information was a very valuable resource for these newspapers because otherwise, we say, people at such a senior level would not have taken the time to be personally involved in it.”
It also emerged on Wednesday that Mirror Group Newspapers has spent £2,258,225 on using private investigators on nearly 13,700 occasions between 2000 and 2007.
A total of 130 private investigators’ invoices were found relating to the eight celebrities in this trial, with the majority concerning Frost, Gascoigne and the soap star Lucy Taggart, née Benjamin.
Sherborne said the newspaper group had admitted that a “substantial but unquantifiable” number of these invoices involved unlawful information gathering, such as blagging the call records of a celebrity.
Call data allegedly shows that five senior journalists were hacking celebrities “prolifically” from Mirror Group landline phones, racking up 69 hours of calls between them.
Call data allegedly shows that five senior journalists were
responsible for 43% of nearly 10,000 calls made allegedly to intercept voicemails from the Orange network between 2002 and 2008.
The court heard that the volume of calls dropped by about 80-90% following the arrests of Clive Goodman, the News of the World royal editor, and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire over phone hacking in August 2006.
Sherborne said: “Wholly consistent with what we say about the vast majority of these calls being voicemail interception is that there was a massive drop in calls to this platform in the week that the press announce that Mr Mulcaire and Mr Goodman have been arrested.”
He told the court that expense receipts for so-called burner phones, which were favoured for snooping on voicemails because they could be easily disposed of, were approved by “senior members of MGN”.
The court has heard that hacking at Mirror Group Newspapers was rife for about a decade.
Such was the scale of phone hacking that one senior journalist wanted a colleague to create “an enigma-type machine that would automatically crack pin codes”, making it easier to intercept voicemails, the court was told.
In an email read to the court, a senior editorial staff member warned colleagues not to telephone a TV producer because “he’s answering” – meaning the journalists would not be able to access his voicemails and may be rumbled.
The court heard that senior journalists made in-jokes about a hacked voicemail alleged to have been the source of a scoop revealing former England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson’s affair with television presenter Ulrika Jonsson. In an email about a Guardian Media Monkey story about an unnamed tabloid journalist who landed the scoop, the senior journalist asked sarcastically: “Oh dear. Who would that have been?”
