Phone hacking: NI asks legal firm to draw up code of practice

News International chief Rebekah Brooks hopes move will prevent repeat of News of the World hacking affair News International said on Thursday it has asked leading legal firm Olswang to draw up a new code of practice for the company in an effort to prevent a repeat of the phone-hacking affair at the News of the World. In an email to staff the News International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, said Olswang had been hired “to examine in great detail what can be learnt from the past”. Brooks added that Olswang “will recommend a series of policies, practices and systems to create a more robust governance, compliance and legal structure for our papers that we hope over time can become a standard for the industry”. The move is an attempt by Brooks to show she is taking a proactive approach to the phone-hacking scandal, which has prompted legal action from around 30 public figures who claim their voicemail messages were illegally intercepted by a private investigator working for the News of the World. It also underlines the remarkable U-turn the company has performed since the Guardian first revealed nearly two years ago that it had made secret payments to several victims in exchange for their silence. Brooks reacted at the time, July 2009, by issuing a statement which claimed: “The Guardian coverage, we believe, has substantially and likely deliberately misled the British public.” At the start of this year, however, the company handed over information about Ian Edmondson, the paper’s former assistant editor (news) which led to his arrest by Scotland Yard. The Metropolitan police reopened its investigation into phone hacking at the paper and after a raft of civil actions were brought by victims, News International admitted liability in some cases and apologised. It announced in April it would set up a compensation scheme to make payments to victims who could prove their phones were hacked. Brooks said in her email to staff on Thursday afternoon that the phone-hacking scandal meant “testing times ahead”. She admitted the affair would “continue to challenge us as a company from a reputational and resource perspective”, but added that News International had made “significant progress” on the issue over the last year. “I am determined that NI is led in a way that deals with these matters properly. I want both external and internal acknowledgement that we have done the right thing – by facing up to our responsibilities where things have gone wrong and having done our utmost to correct them,” she said. News International has also formalised the roles of several key executives who have been managing the group’s response to the phone-hacking crisis by setting up a management and standards committee. It will be staffed by general manager Will Lewis, director of corporate affairs Simon Greenberg and Jeff Palker, who is general consul at the European and Asian arm of NI’s parent company News Corp. They will continue to report directly to Brooks. • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”. • To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook . Phone hacking Newspapers & magazines National newspapers Newspapers News International Rebekah Brooks News of the World James Robinson guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 30, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.