Gordon Brown has said there is “no hiding place” for senior executives at News Group Newspapers, as Scotland Yard continues to investigate claims the former prime minister was “falsely” implicated along with the Labour peer Tom Watson in a “fake security threat” to “justify” the deletion of millions of emails.
Brown said on Wednesday: “The Metropolitan police have confirmed their investigations into my allegations of misbehaviour within the Murdoch group are ongoing and will run into 2025.”
He added that “after many years of demanding it, there is now no hiding place” for anyone who may be guilty of obstruction of justice. The former prime minister complained to the Met as the allegations emerged in documents disclosed earlier this year in pre-trial hearings in the Prince Harry and Watson legal action against NGN, the publishers of the Sun and the now defunct News of the World.
The documents involved the Met’s minutes of a 2011 meeting between detectives investigating phone-hacking allegations and Will Lewis, now the chief executive of the Washington Post, who at the time was the group general manager of News International.
The minutes recorded that Lewis had told officers a source had warned a former member of staff had accessed the then News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks’s emails, had passed them to Watson “and it was controlled by Gordon Brown”. The “security threat” was then used to justify the mass deletion of emails, the high court previously heard.
Brown said he had provided a witness statement supporting Watson in the case. He said the Met had replied to his complaint, saying: “We have now completed an initial assessment of the material you have provided, which we are considering alongside past police investigations. We hope to provide a more detailed response in the new year.”
He called on the Met “to examine new evidence as it becomes available from civil case court documents where it suggests charges for perjury and the perversion of the course of justice”.
Brown’s statement referenced his original letter to Mark Rowley, in which he urged the Met commissioner to review evidence relating to “the concealment and destruction of up to 30 million emails, hard drives and documents” – and had called on the Met to launch an investigation “into the destruction of evidence” and “the cover-up that followed”.
Referring to the claim that he and Lord Watson conspired to steal Brooks’s data, Brown said he believed “this false allegation [was used] to justify the deletion of millions of emails after a criminal investigation had commenced”.
NGN has previously denied that the 2011 security threat over the suspected theft of Brooks’s emails was devised as part of a “cover-up”.
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