Document showing Rebekah Brooks approved payment for story was not disclosed to police, jury hears
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Version 0 of 1. A document showing that former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks personally authorised a cash payment for a story was not disclosed to police investigating whether staff at her paper were paying bungs to public officials for tipoffs, a jury has heard. The jury in the trial of four Sun journalists at the Old Bailey has also been told that the police were not initially investigating journalists at the paper until they were handed documents by the Sun publisher. The document bearing Brooks’s signature was produced on Wednesday at the trial, by counsel for the paper’s royal correspondent Duncan Larcombe. It was dated 2009 and related to a payment for £250 for a story which cannot be detailed for legal reasons. The Sun’s former newsdesk secretary, Charlotte Hull, was asked to identify the signature and confirmed it as that of Brooks. Mark Kandiah, the Metropolitan police officer in charge of the Operation Elveden investigation into alleged inappropriate payments to public officials at the Sun, confirmed this document had not been part of the disclosures by the management and standards committee (MSC) at News International, the paper’s publisher. “Have you seen this document before?” asked Richard Kovalevsky, QC for Larcombe. “As far as your recollection goes, this was not disclosed to you by the MSC?” “With the frailty of memory, that’s right,” responded Kandiah. Earlier the retired police office told jurors that Operation Elveden was an investigation into alleged inappropriate payments to police. It had been set up in the summer of 2011 by the Met in the wake of Operation Weeting, its investigation into phone-hacking at the Sun’s now-defunct News International sister title, the News of the World. But it was not originally investigating payments by journalists at the Sun. “In its earlier stage, it was specifically police officers [we were investigating], and it was subsequently expanded [to include journalists],” Kandiah testified. The jury heard that the MSC was set up by Sun proprietor Rupert Murdoch to investigate conduct at all his titles in his UK publishing operation, News International, in 2011. When Kandiah took over as the senior investigating officer on Elveden in September 2011 he learned that the MSC had already started “The Sun Review”. “The MSC themselves initiated an internal review of the other papers: the Times, the Sunday Times and the Sun,” said Kandiah. “This wasn’t a matter for the police, this was something they undertook themselves.” He was asked by Larcombe’s junior barrister, Jamas Hodivala, how the police ascertained the relevance of evidence if they did not have access to internal emails. He said that the MSC decided what was relevant. Kandiah told jurors that a memorandum of understanding was entered into with News International which “gave a framework for voluntary disclosure to the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service]”. He agreed that in building a case against the journalists on trial, some evidence may have flowed from the “arrest and search operations” but “the vast majority came from the [MSC]”. He described this as “less than satisfactory” but the police had no other way of getting such evidence. “We looked at other options, there simply weren’t other options,” he said. Police normally have to go to court to get permission to search a newspaper’s operations because of the special protection given to journalists’ sources. On trial are Larcombe, the Sun’s deputy editor Geoff Webster, executive editor Fergus Shanahan, and the paper’s chief reporter John Kay. All four deny conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office. The trial continues. |