Researcher paid people for testimony about Daily Mail, high court told | Daily Mail
An investigator investigating media breaches of the law paid private detectives and former journalists for their statements about alleged illegal activities at the Daily Mail publisher, the high court has heard.
Graham Johnson, a former phone hacker who later turned to investigating illegal activity in the press, has confirmed he paid six people involved in a lawsuit brought by Prince Harry and others against Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL).
But he said he never paid for witness testimony. Appearing in court, he said he had paid the group as his contacts, authors and contributors as he attempted to draw attention to unlawful behavior by the media.
Most of the funding for those payments came either from former multimillionaire and privacy advocate Max Mosley or from a company tied to Mosley’s estate, Johnson said. Some came from a loan from Evan Harris, the former Liberal Democrat MP and leading member of the Hacked Off campaign group.
The payouts included £75,000 to private investigator Gavin Burrows, who made the most serious allegations of phone hacking, landline tapping and wiretapping. Burrows now claims that the signature on the witness statement regarding his illegal activities for ANL was forged.
ANL denies all allegations that a group of plaintiffs, including Prince Harry, Doreen Lawrence, Sir Elton John and husband David Furnish, and actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost, collected unlawful information.
The publisher called the accusations “preposterous” and said all the articles stemmed from “entirely legitimate reporting.”
Johnson, an investigator assisting the plaintiffs’ case at the high court, confirmed he had paid more than £100,000 to individuals whose claims were at the center of the allegations facing ANL.
Johnson paid Burrows £25,000 for “extensive notes and comments” and £5,000 a month for 10 months as part of an agreement to work on a memoir.
Glenn Mulcaire and Greg Miskiw, both convicted of phone hacking, were paid £22,000 and £12,000 respectively between 2015 and 2016. Johnson was also shown an email from ANL’s legal team in which he said he was trying to persuade Mulcaire to “up his game”.
Steve Whittamore, who was found guilty of breaching information laws in 2005, was paid £5,000 of a £15,000 contract in 2021.
US-based private investigator Daniel Portley-Hanks was paid £6,000 for his work on a book, as well as “a few hundred dollars” for his archive. Another private investigator and journalist, Christine Hart, was paid £5,000 by Johnson.
The plaintiffs’ legal team accuses ANL of using Burrows to carry out a range of illegal activities. They accuse Hart of “spoiling” information on behalf of the publisher, Portley-Hanks and Whittamore of obtaining private personal information, and Mulcaire and Miskiw of obtaining information obtained from phone hacking.
ANL’s lead lawyer, Antony White, told Johnson there was “a pattern of payments, or promises of payments, to people to provide evidence that could be used against the Associated or newspapers more generally”.
“I think this is part of your modus operandi to investigate evidence of illegal collection of information against Associated and to pay people who can provide potentially useful evidence,” he said.
Johnson has repeatedly denied the claim, stating that the money was paid to his sources for “journalistic reasons”.
“I have never paid for witness statements used in legal proceedings,” he said. “I have received legal advice, including written advice, on numerous occasions, and I have been faithful and followed that advice.”
He said he had written many articles about the group and published interviews with some of them in the BBC’s Panorama and other publications. “I took what was a dead story and brought it back into popular culture, and it did,” Johnson said.
In written submissions, White said the charges against ANL were the product of an attempt by the plaintiffs’ investigators and legal team to present a case “based entirely on false and/or discredited information, none of which was in the form of proper admissible evidence before the court.”
The case continues.
