The British private eye jailed for
hacking into celebrities’ voice mails to get stories for a News
Corp.’s News of the World tabloid began a U.K. trial to pursue
his claim the company must pay his legal fees.
Glenn Mulcaire is defending himself from multiple civil
lawsuits filed by victims and a parallel Court of Appeal case
over his refusal to identify which News of the World reporters
instructed him to hack phones. He claims the New York-based
company’s British unit shouldn’t have stopped paying his legal
fees in July, after British lawmakers accused News Corp. of
seeking to buy Mulcaire’s silence with the payments.
“Despite the rhetoric of parliamentarians, there is
nothing exotic, unusual or improper in the arrangements” to pay
his legal fees, Mulcaire’s lawyer, Benjamin Williams, said at
the trial today. When both an employer and an employee have
acted illegally, “it is not remarkable to find the employer
paying its employee’s legal costs.”
The trial began a day after a judge-led inquiry into the
ethics of the British media heard police retract one of the most
damaging claims against Mulcaire — that he deleted the voice
mails of murdered school girl Milly Dowler while she was still
missing in 2002, giving her parents false hope she was alive.
While the claim isn’t related to any lawsuit, a Guardian
newspaper article about the deletions in July resulted in News
Corp. (NWSA) shutting the 168-year-old tabloid to help contain public
outrage. The Guardian has since corrected the story.
London police, who are re-examining Mulcaire’s notebooks
seized in 2006 and contacting hundreds of possible victims, have
arrested 20 people since January, including the paper’s former
editors, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. Mulcaire was arrested
last week as part of the new probe, Sky News reported.
Mulcaire and Clive Goodman, a News of the World reporter,
were arrested in 2006 and jailed the next year for intercepting
phone messages meant for members of Prince Charles’ staff and
for Gordon Taylor, chief executive officer of the Professional
Footballers Association.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Erik Larson in London at
elarson4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Anthony Aarons at
aaarons@bloomberg.net
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Article source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-13/ex-news-corp-hacker-mulcaire-s-trial-seeking-legal-fees-begins-in-london.html
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