Letters Sent to DPP Alison Saunders and Met Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe about Fake Sheikh Beckham Kidnap
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Monthly Archives: November 2014
Mazher Mahmood using private eye to target Tom Watson during Parliamentary Inquiry into Phone Hacking
The final edition of News of the World, published on 10 July 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Another anomaly from Mazher Mahmood‘s evidence at the Leveson inquiry that he never employed a private detective after his extensive work with Southern Investigations in the 90s.
This is from 2009 when Tom Watson was asking questions as a member of the DCMS select committee about News of the World phone hacking
Right up unto 2009, while at News of the World, Mahmood commissioned a private investigator to stalk Tom Watson MP at a Labour Party conference.
Watson told the Leveson Inquiry that Mahmood – known as the ‘Fake Sheikh – hired Derek Webb to trail him in 2009, to establish whether he was having an affair.
Watson was then a prominent member of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee examining phone hacking at the News of the World. He claimed that News International had a vendetta against him after he spoke out against the company.
Webb – a former police officer and nicknamed ‘the silent shadow’ – followed Watson and another Labour MP for seven days during the Brighton conference, billing News of the World in excess of a £1000 for his services.
(Around the same time Webb was also surveilling key lawyers in the phone hacking scandal – Charlotte Harris and Mark Lewis)
An email exchange published by the Independent on Sunday with Ian Edmondson and James Mellor , show that Mahmood was the source of the erroneous tip off.
Was this abortive investigation in the public interest or part of the task of the free press to expose corruption?
Or was it – like the legal moves involving the Attorney General and the Panorama expose of the Fake Sheikh – a politicized attempt to intimidate and silence critics through character assassination?
Read the emails below and come to your own conclusion:
Mulcaire, Miskiw, Mahmood and the Special Investigations Unit set up by Rebekah Brooks at News of the World
Before Panorama airs at 7.30 tonight, after two delays, it might be worth looking at the background of MazHer Mahmood, aka the Fake Sheikh, at News of the World under the editorship of Rebekah Brooks, from early 2000 to early 2003.
Mahmood’s activities in the decade leading up to this have been covered in a previous post about his connections with Southern Investigations. But the problems with that notorious private investigations firm, due to police inquiries and arrests of key personnel around this time, may explain what happened next.
Investigations were taken in house.
One of the first things Brooks did as editor of Britain’s best selling paper was to recall Greg Miskiw from New York, where he had set up office, and form an Investigations Team that worked outside both the Features and News Desk. From various bits of evidence show the floating membership from 2000 onwards to consist of:
Greg Miskiw – head
Neville Thurlbeck – reporter
Sarah Arnold – reporter
Paul McMullan – reporter
Glenn Mulcaire (as reported by Geoff Sweet in the sports pages)
Mazher Mahmood – undercover reporter
Bradley Page – photographer who replaced his father in law Steve Grayson
Conrad Brown – technical and surveillance
Mazher Mahmood exposé will be screened on BBC despite the legal hitch | Media | theguardian.com
James Harding, the corporation’s director of news and current affairs, told the Society of Editors earlier today that it “is a seriously good piece of work, extremely revealing and squarely in the public interest.
“But, he explained, “the worst of all worlds is when you get the big picture right, and trip up over a detail.”So when some information we’d been asking to see for many days was sent to us by Mazher Mahmood’s lawyers at 7 o’clock last night, we, as a responsible broadcaster, had to consider it. We’re looking at it, and we’ll make sense of it as quickly as we can, and then we’ll broadcast it.”
My understanding is that the information concerns just one specific allegation in Fake Sheikh: Exposed. The implications of that new matter provided by Mahmood’s lawyers, Kingsley Napley, are under consideration now.
Whatever the outcome, it is too minor a detail to affect the eventual screening of the documentary in which Panorama’s reporter, John Sweeney, interviews some of Mahmood’s former assistants. They cast light on Mahmood’s journalistic methods during his investigations.
via Mazher Mahmood exposé will be screened on BBC despite the legal hitch | Media | theguardian.com.
LYING TO LEVESON | PRESS GANG
SIR JOHN STEVENS
METROPOLITAN POLICE Commissioner from 2000 to 2005, Sir John Stevens— now Lord Stevens — was on good terms with the “Fake Sheik”. In his 2008 autobiography, Mahmood tells the story of how he and then News of the World editor Andy Coulson were invited to have drinks with Stevens at New Scotland Yard in 2003. It was shortly after the Crown Prosecution Service decision to abandon charges in the Beckham kidnap affair because one of Mahmood’s informants was considered an unreliable witness …
Photo: PA
THERE WAS one final piece of information Leveson was not prepared to consider.
This involved Mahmood’s links with a firm of private detectives called Southern Investigations.
One of the partners was a former Metropolitan Police detective sergeant, Sid Fillery.
Fillery had retired and joined Southern Investigations, taking the place of Daniel Morgan, a private detective brutally murdered in 1987.
The other partner was Jonathan Rees, who was arrested several times on suspicion of being involved in the murder.
He was never convicted
However, Rees was gaoled for 7 years in 2000 after he was caught planning a conspiracy with corrupt police detectives to plant drugs on an innocent woman to prove she was an unfit mother.
Fillery was convicted in 2003 of making fifteen indecent images of children.
His computer included photographs of two naked boys engaged in oral sex and another showing the anal penetration of a young girl.
Southern Investigations acted as brokers between corrupt police officers who wanted to sell sensitive information to newspapers, including the News of the World.
In his evidence to Leveson, Mahmood doesn’t name the firm but it appears to be Southern Investigations.He told the Inquiry:
” … I stopped working with them at the end of 1992 or early 1993 …”
However, in our statement we told the Leveson Inquiry we had seen documents seized during anti-corruption inquiries which suggested this also wasn’t true.
These documents revealed that in 1999 Rees and Fillery carried out “confidential inquiries” into “illegal immigration” after receiving a “request” from “Maz Mahmood”.
The invoice for this work, submitted in July 1999, was for £1,488.72 — one of the largest the firm raised in that year.
bellingcat – Mazher Mahmood and the Met – Too Close for Comfort?
There were sea changes at the Metropolian Police Service MPS and at the News of the World NOTW as the 1990s came to a close.
The new MPS Commissioner – John Stevens – wanted to encourage positive press through a closer relationship with national newspapers. At NOTW a new editor – Rebekah Wade – had been appointed who was keen get headlines for their investigative exposés.
A new millenium needed a new modus operandi.
But there was a problem. NOTW could no longer use their favourite private detectives, Southern Investigations, as one of its owners had got a lengthy jail sentence for perverting the course of justice. Southern Investigations had been essential to NOTW, providing video surveillance equipment, bodyguards and customised information gathering.
In 1999, NOTW commissioned Southern to put then Deputy MPS Commissioner John Stevens under surveillance. This was on an unfounded and untrue tip that he was flying from London to Northumbria to visit a secret mistress. Whether this surveillance was with a view to publishing a story or whether it was to gain leverage is a contested point. In addition, NOTW may have used Southern investigations to put their own newspaper staff under surveillance
via bellingcat – Mazher Mahmood and the Met – Too Close for Comfort?.
Related articles
Did Mazher Mahmood mislead Leveson about the Dark Arts of his Past?
With Monday’s BBC1 Panorama documentary set to shed new light into the activities of News of the World‘s most famous reporter, Mazher Mahmood, the Fake Sheikh, it is worth going back over his evidence to the Leveson Inquiry.
Though Mahmood’s identity was concealed, his witness statements make for some eye opening reading.
The ‘particular firm’ Mahmood mentions, used regularly by News of the World executives Greg Miskiw and Alex Marunchak, was none other than Southern Investigations.
Last year a senior police officer told me that Southern Investigations’ relationship with News of the World,”“was without question the maternity ward where the Dark Arts were born.”
Mr Justice Saunders’ Sentencing remarks on Ian Edmondson
It’s been a busy week in events connected to the hacking trial. As previous posts here have tried to explain there has been new evidence about Rebekah Brooks’ authorisation of cash payments from the trial of six Sun journalists at Kingston Crown Court; and two ongoing trials at the Old Bailey. The jury returned a guilty verdict for one News of the World journalist for ‘conspiracy to commit misconduct in public officer’ for paying a prison officer for stories about Jon Venables. This journalist cannot be named for legal reasons.
Meanwhile, the famous News of the World ‘fake sheikh’, Mazher Mahmood, lost a high court battle to prevent his image being broadcast in a BBC 1 Panorama documentary about his activity this coming Monday at 8.30 pm – various blog posts, here, here and here about Mr Mr Mahmood. And then today we had the sentencing of the fourth news desk editor Ian Edmondson for Phone hacking at the main hacking trial. Mr Justice Saunders remarks are reprinted below in full
The Millions of Deleted Emails from News International
Some of the agreed facts from the hacking trial put another complexion on the 3 million missing emails mentioned in the Guardian coverage of Kingston trial.
If you read the last paragraph of the agreed facts from the phone hacking trial earlier this year, the number is more like 13 million missing emails.
156, In excess of 90 million email messages emanating from the NI email systems have been retrieved in order to be searched for the purpose of this prosecution. They represent available or potentially available messages from across the organization and are not limited to persons of interest to the police investigation and include duplicates of messages and also messages recovered for the years up to 2011.
157 This does not represent all email messages ever sent or received by current and historic employees of NOTW and The Sun. Not every email message ever sent or received within NI still exists. This is for a number of reasons.
The Kingston Defence: Sun journalists shopped by News Corp to avoid corporate charges
There will be much more to say about this in due course, as news trickles out from the rampantly under-reported Kingston Crown Court trial of the ‘Sun Six’: but it should be noted that evidence about hundreds of missing signed cash payments from former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks, as well as details of the various Memoranda of Understanding between the Met and the Management and Services Committee set up by News Corp in 2011 is being adduced by the defence teams at Kingston
There Chris Pharo, Sun’s former head of news, former managing editor Graham Dudman, deputy news editor Ben O’Driscoll, picture editor John Edwards, and reporters Jamie Pyatt and John Troup are on trial.
The line of their lawyers, reported also in the Guardian and Independent, is clear: Sun journalists were “shopped’ to the police by the company, in order to avoid the threat of corporate charges. (See more from Court News below)
Meanwhile some breaking news from Jamie Pyatt’s police interview, read out in court today
Pyatt speaks of “being investigated by ourselves for something we’ve been told to do…They tell me what to do. I didn’t pay police officers
Pyatt police interview:contact with public officials, and payment to them, organised centrally through the news desk “I was told what to do”
— Peter Jukes (@peterjukes) November 6, 2014
— Peter Jukes (@peterjukes) November 6, 2014
More from Sun reporter Pyatt’s police interview, read to court: “News Desk aware person wanting £500 or £1000. They send me out to do story”
— Peter Jukes (@peterjukes) November 6, 2014
The Criminal Media Nexus 