So this is how you become a massively successful media mogul; fund journalists and editors who break the law:
Lawyers have secured explosive new evidence linking one of the News of the World‘s most senior editorial executives to the hacking of voicemail messages from the phones of Sienna Miller, Jude Law and their friends and employees.
In a document lodged in the high court, the lawyers also disclose evidence that the hacking of phones of the royal household was part of a scheme commissioned by the newspaper and not simply the unauthorised work of its former royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, acting as a “rogue reporter”, as it has previously claimed.
The 20-page document, written by Sienna Miller’s solicitor, Mark Thomson, and barrister, Hugh Tomlinson, cites extracts from paperwork and other records that were seized by police from the News of the World’s private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, in August 2006. The material has now been released to the lawyers on the orders of a high court judge.
The document claims Mulcaire’s handwritten notes imply that the news editor of the NoW, Ian Edmondson, instructed him to intercept Miller’s voicemail and that the operation also involved targeting her mother, her publicist and one of her closest friends as well as Law, her former partner, and his personal assistant. During the operation Mulcaire obtained confidential data held by mobile phone companies in relation to nine different phone numbers, the notes reveal.
The document, which has been released to the Guardian by the high court, suggests that the hacking of the two actors was part of a wider scheme, hatched early in 2005, when Mulcaire agreed to use “electronic intelligence and eavesdropping” to supply the paper with daily transcripts of the messages of a list of named targets from the worlds of politics, royalty and entertainment.