The hackers, HACKED

As the trial of claims for phone hacking and related unlawful information gathering against Prince Harry and over 100 other claimants (collectively known in court as ‘The Claimant Group’) against Mirror Group Newspapers continues, Platinum looks at the gathering of information by illegal means involving a web of corruption, blackmail and coercion.

By Alan Wares

In 1999, the Metropolitan Police were looking the unsolved 1987 murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan in a pub car park in Sydenham, south London. Morgan ran Southern Investigations with his business partner Jonathan Rees. Although acquitted in 2009 of Morgan’s murder, it was found that Rees was one of the key players in obtaining information illegally on behalf of the News of the World newspaper.

The lack of successful prosecution of Rees was put down to many acts of what reports referred to as ‘institutional corruption’ within the Metropolitan Police. The senior investigating officer, Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery, later replaced Morgan at Southern Investigations upon his retirement from the force. He had already been unofficially ‘working’ with them while a police officer, but failed to inform his superiors.

Rees himself was imprisoned for seven years on a separate count of perverting the course of justice when he sought to plant cocaine on a man involved in a child custody case. Upon his release, he worked on a freelance basis for the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror as well as the News of the World.

After the collapse of the Morgan murder trial at the Old Bailey, in March 2011 it was revealed that Rees had earned £150,000 a year from the News of the World for supplying illegally obtained information about people in the public eye.

He had a network of contacts with corrupt police officers, who obtained confidential records for him. He claimed that his extensive contacts provided him with confidential information from banks and government organisations and he was routinely able to obtain confidential data from bank accounts, telephone records, car registration details and computers. He was also alleged to have commissioned burglaries on behalf of journalists.