How the Rupert Murdochs company 'bought silence' after phone hacking
Three of the senior journalists from the News of the World who were convicted of phone hacking and sacked by the paper were given “huge sums of money” by the Murdoch company after threatening to implicate senior executives—including reinstalled chief executive Rebekah Brooks—in their crimes, according to documents lodged in the High Court.
This includes a claim that Brooks knew about the hacking of the phone of the missing schoolgirl, Milly Dowler—something that she has always denied. Counsel for the claimants, David Sherborne, told the High Court: “We say Ms Brooks... was well aware of the Dowler story and the basis on which it was obtained.” In 2014, an Old Bailey jury found her not guilty of conspiring to hack voicemail.
The allegations emerged after the Murdoch company was ordered to disclose paperwork from cases for wrongful dismissal brought by three former news editors of the News of the World who had pleaded guilty to hacking: Ian Edmondson, who was sentenced to eight months; Neville Thurlbeck, who was sentenced to six months; and James Weatherup, who was given a suspended sentence. Claimants have set out several summaries of these employment cases in open court and in public pleadings, though the full text of the paperwork remains confidential.
Based on the case papers that they have been shown, the claimants say that the Murdoch company originally tried to strike out all three employment cases, on the grounds that the criminal convictions of the former journalists meant that their claims had no chance of succeeding. The three journalists then, the documents suggest, “amended their claims to allege that senior executives knew of and encouraged the unlawful activities for which they had been convicted”. As a result, say the claimants, the cases “were settled for huge sums of money… in the region of hundreds of thousands of pounds.” The settlement—which is said to have included “gagging clauses” to prevent the three men airing their allegations—was reached soon after Rebekah Brooks returned to her job as chief executive of the main UK Murdoch company in September 2015.
more... https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/phone-hacking/66028/how-the-murdoch-company-bought-silence-after-phone-hacking