It has emerged that a legal claim over email hacking made against Rupert Murdoch’s former UK outfit, News International, has been quietly settled.
The details of the settlement between the publisher and the claimants - Jane Winter and British-Irish Rights Watch (BIRW) - are confidential, but I am able to report the bare facts.
The two News International subsidiaries, News Group Newspapers and Times Newspapers, made the settlement without admitting liability.
However, both BIRW and Winter, who was director of BIRW until her retirement in 2012, consider that they have been “fully vindicated” by having secured the settlement.
Winter, who cannot reveal how much she was paid, has donated the money she received to BIRW (a human rights group that now appears to have morphed into Rights Watch UK).
She and BIRW issued a claim in the high court in April 2012 alleging that News Group and Times Newspapers had been guilty of gathering information by illegal means.
Her concerns about her emails having been hacked were aired during her evidence to the Leveson inquiry. Winter referred at the time to a statement given to the inquiry by Ian Hurst, a former member of British military intelligence and the Force Research Unit in Northern Ireland, in which he said he believed that News of the World staff had hacked into emails between him and Winter, and also cites Times Newspapers as possibly having some part in the hacking.
Winter told Leveson that she had been informed by Hurst in July 2011 that emails she had sent to him in confidence had been accessed when his computer had been hacked.
She told the inquiry: “Correspondence that I had with third parties that I had sent to Ian Hurst appears to have been accessed by the person(s) who hacked into his computer”.
She said she had been interviewed by Metropolitan police officers working on Operation Tuleta, the force’s investigation into computer hacking, and gave them a statement to assist their inquiries.
Winter declined to speak about the settlement. It is understood that she wishes to avoid prejudicing any possible future trial should the Met charge anyone with the hacking.
The BIRW/Winter legal settlement came as something of a surprise to an Irish-based blogger, Paul Larkin, who has spent years studying allegations of hacking by News International titles in Ireland.
On his blog he points out that a report in the Independent in April 2012 quoted News International as saying that Jane Winter’s legal action against Times Newspapers would be “vigorously defended”. Yet it is now clear that the action has been quietly settled.
Larkin, in arguing that News International’s settlement with Winter should be made public appears sceptical about Operation Tuleta leading to prosecutions. He calls instead for the authorities on both sides of the border to launch full inquiries into computer hacking by News International operatives in Ireland.