Source:
The New York TimesLONDON — When a Parliamentary committee first confronted The News of the World with charges of phone hacking in 2007, the paper’s owners produced a reassuring, one-paragraph letter from a prominent London law firm named Harbottle and Lewis.
The firm had been hired to review e-mails of the tabloid’s royal reporter, who had pleaded guilty to hacking the mobile phone messages of royal household staff. The letter said senior editors were not aware of the reporter’s “illegal actions,” which helped convince lawmakers that hacking was not endemic at the tabloid.
That letter has taken on new significance since it emerged in recent weeks that those e-mails, while not pointing to wider knowledge of hacking, did contain indications of payoffs to the police by journalists in exchange for information. The circumstances behind the writing of that single paragraph are being examined as part of criminal and Parliamentary inquires into whether the tabloid’s parent company, News International, the British subsidiary of News Corporation, engineered a four-year cover-up of information suggesting criminal wrongdoing.
In interviews, two people familiar with both the contents of the e-mails and discussions between the executives and the law firm provided new details about the possible payoffs. The two people also indicated that both News International and the firm were aware of the information when the reassuring letter was written, yet defined their task as only addressing the hacking issue.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/30/world/europe/30letter.html?pagewanted=all
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