FORMER UK prime minister Gordon Brown has lodged a new complaint to police against Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
The complaint relates to allegations that the billionaire’s newspapers obstructed justice, after the former Labour politicians spoke to officers involved in the original phone-hacking inquiry.
In a piece for the Guardian, Brown claims one of the detectives involved in the probe alleged there was “significant evidence” News Group Newspapers (NGN) deleted millions of emails to pervert the course of justice.
Brown says that according to the former officers, they would have pushed for further action if they had been aware of the background to the email deletions.
“If we had known this in 2011, we would have investigated fully and taken a different course of action including considering arrests,” Brown says one former officer told him.
NGN has denied any evidence was deleted, adding that in 2015 the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that email deletions made by the company were not carried out to pervert the course of justice.
Brown wrote in the newspaper: “Today I am making a criminal complaint to the Met and CPS alleging that I am, along with many others, a victim of the obstruction of the course of justice by News Group.
“This is not an allegation made lightly. It is informed by recently available evidence, and by the statements of senior officers involved in the original investigations into unlawful news gathering, who have now stated to me that they were misled.”
They also apologised for the “serious intrusion by the Sun between 1996 and 2011 into his private life, including incidents of unlawful activities carried out by private investigators working for the Sun”.
It was part of an out-of-court settlement to end a case brought against NGH by Harry and former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson.
The settlement has “not closed an era of investigation and litigation into media corruption. It has opened it up,” Brown wrote.
It follows claims made by former detectives contained in a document filed with the high court in London, in support of the long-running litigation against NGN phone-hacking by Harry and Watson.
Brown also accused Will Lewis, formerly a senior NGN executive, now chief executive of the Washington Post, of attempting to incriminate him and Watson.
He claims Lewis said the company had been told of a plot involving Brown and Watson to obtain the emails of then chief executive of News International Rebekah Brooks.
Brown has suggested this false claim was used to justify the deletion of emails to officers part of Operation Weeting, the Metropolitan police investigation into phone-hacking allegations.
He said an investigating officer told him that NGN: “falsely implicated Gordon Brown. If I had known this I would have made arrests for obstruction of justice.”
Lewis has previously denied any wrongdoing.
“NGN once again strenuously denies that there was any plan to delete emails in order to conceal evidence from a police investigation,” a spokesperson for the company said.
NGC accused Brown of being an “unreliable complainant driven by vendetta and revenge for perceived wrongs by NGN”.
