The board of Trinity Mirror and its legal team were aware of hacking and did not stop it at the company’s newspapers including the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People, alleged victims of phone hacking have claimed.
The TV presenter John Leslie, the actor Ralf Little and the former Celebrity Big Brother contestant Chantelle Houghton are claiming aggravated damages on the basis that Trinity Mirror’s board and legal team were aware of hacking from 2002 at the earliest and certainly by 2007, and then took steps to cover it up.
At a high court hearing in London, David Sherborne, acting for the claimants, argued that a series of comments in witness statements from other hacking cases, the Leveson inquiry and internal probes demonstrated that directors at Trinity Mirror and the legal team were aware of the “habitual or widespread use of these unlawful information-gathering activities” and could have prevented them from being carried out.
These included comments from the broadcaster Jeremy Paxman claiming that in 2002 the editor of the Daily Mirror at the time, Piers Morgan, had talked about hacking at a lunch hosted by Sir Victor Blank, then the chairman of Trinity Mirror.
Sherborne said: “Unsurprisingly, the discovery that knowledge of illegal activities at the highest level of a public limited company, and within the legal department, and their deliberate concealment has severely aggravated the distress and injury to the claimants’ feelings caused by the illegal activities themselves. It is aggravation of entirely different quality and magnitude.”
Lawyers for Trinity Mirror said the evidence presented did not show that company executives or the legal team were aware of hacking. They also said the claims were “not relevant” to the hacking case and that it was a “fallacy” to suggest the board could have stopped unlawful behaviour because “whoever was involved could have stopped the act”.
Richard Spearman, acting for the Mirror, said: “In my submission it doesn’t matter how it [the company] came to do that [hacking], it did it.”
Earlier this month, the actors Steve Coogan and Sienna Miller won hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages after Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), a subsidiary of Trinity Mirror, admitted hacking their phones and covering up unlawful activities.
Coogan appeared at the high court for his settlement to be confirmed in front of Mr Justice Mann. The amount of damages was not revealed in court and is confidential, but Coogan confirmed afterwards it was a six-figure sum and said the scale of it “will make Mirror executives blush”. It is thought to be one of the biggest ever payments related to phone hacking.
Trinity Mirror has put aside more than £50m to cover the costs of the hacking scandal, including compensation payouts and legal fees. It has already settled dozens of cases, including a batch of 44 in April that included the former England football manager Kevin Keegan, the writer Jeffrey Archer, the actor Patsy Kensit and the former home secretary Charles Clarke.
Sadie Frost, the actor and fashion designer, received a record payment from MGN of £260,250 in 2015. However, this settlement is understood to have been surpassed since then by payouts that have not been made public, including the settlement for the actor Elizabeth Hurley, which was confirmed in May. Hurley alleged that MGN published 58 separate articles between July 1998 and March 2007 that included information that had been obtained unlawfully.
