Thursday 21 July 2011

Phone hacking: John Yates and the July 2009 Guardian articles

In recent days the actions (or failures to act) of the then Assistant Commissioner John Yates in response to July 2009 articles in the Guardian has come under some scrutiny.

On 9th July 2009 the Metropolitan Police Service issued a statement by John Yates. See Statement from AC John Yates.

On 8th and 9th July 2009 the Guardian had published information about the seeming inadequacy of the Metropolitan Police investigation into that and related matters. (The electronic copy appears to have been published late on 8th July 2009 with the hard copy published on 9th July 2009, so far as I can ascertain.)

See, for example, Trail of hacking and deceit under nose of Tory PR chief and Murdoch papers paid £1m to gag phone-hacking victims.

John Yates has accepted that his decision on 9th July 2009 was "very poor" and the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee agreed. See paragraph 15 on page 59 of the report from that committee entitled "Unauthorised tapping into or hacking of mobile communications".

I am currently unable to identify any exploration by the Home Affairs Select Committee about the information in the Guardian about the seemingly illegal actions of Steve Whittamore.

Did John Yates look into that aspect of the Guardian information at all?

No comments:

Post a Comment