Sun’s public interest claim in Sir Fred Goodwin case rejected

Judge tells paper it is ‘most implausible’ that former RBS chief’s alleged affair had any effect on bank’s financial difficulties Read Mr Justice Tugendhat’s judgment in full A high court judge has rejected a claim by the Sun that it was in the public interest to disclose details of an alleged affair between Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, and an unnamed woman who worked at the bank. Mr Justice Tugendhat said that it was “most implausible” that the relationship had any effects on the financial difficulties the bank encountered, which lead to it becoming majority-owned by taxpayers in 2009. He also criticised the newspaper for claiming when it first put the story to Goodwin in March that the woman in question had played a part in determining his severance package when he left the bank. “No evidence for this suggestion has ever been produced by NGN [Sun publisher News Group Newspapers] and there has been no explanation as to how it ever came to be advanced”, he said. “If true, it would have been a very serious matter.” “Sir Fred Goodwin and the lady have both denied that she had any involvement in determining his severance package and that denial is not challenged. Since that initial conversation on 1 March no one on behalf of NGN has mentioned that suggestion again.” Tugendhat pointed out that the Sun had also admitted it had been wrong to claim that the unnamed woman was promoted by Goodwin at the time of their affair and that it had now dropped that claim. He also criticised Liberal Democrat peer Lord Stoneham for naming Goodwin in the House of Lords when the original injunction barring his identity from being revealed as still in force. Tugendhat said Stoneham “was frustrating the purpose of the court order and thus impeding the administration of justice, but he was doing so under the protection of parliamentary privilege”. “If he had identified Sir Fred Goodwin in words spoken outside parliament he would have been interfering with the administration of justice, or committing a contempt of court, as it is called.” He made his comments in a judgment delivered earlier on Thursday on whether a high court injunction preventing the publication of details of the affair should be lifted. He said it should stay in place , but that it could be altered to allow the Sun to reveal the job description of the unnamed woman, referred to in court as VBN, and the length of her relationship with Goodwin. But in his judgment Tugendhat also criticised the Sun and News Group Newspapers, a subsidiary of News International, for arguing that revealing her identity is in the public interest when it said at an earlier hearing that it was not relevant to the story. “It is important to note that [News Group's lawyer] Mr Spearman … said that the identity of the lady was not of significance for the story, nor was it significant that she was an employee of RBS, nor in what field of employment she worked,” he said. “Mr Spearman submitted that the only relevance of the fact that the lady also worked for RBS was that that might have made the affair more distracting than it would have been with someone who Sir Fred Goodwin only came across at the weekend”, Tugendhat added. “At that hearing NGN was expressly disavowing reliance on matters which it is putting at the forefront of its case before me.” The high court judge also rejected a further public interest argument previously advanced by NGN and Daily Mail owner Associated Newspapers, which said the fact the woman was a senior RBS employee meant Goodwin could have broken the bank’s code of conduct. “On the evidence before me, NGN has failed to show that it has conducted such investigations as are reasonably open to it to support the allegations it makes that there has been any breach of the RBS code, or that Sir Fred Goodwin was distracted from his job as chief executive by the relationship with VBN,” he said. On NNGN’s claim that the relationship, which took place at the time of RBS’s disastrous takeover of ABN Amro, distracted Goodwin from his job during a critical period, Tugendhat said: “I regard the suggestion as most implausible, and there is no evidence before me to support it.” Tugendhat also said Goodwin had been right to allow his own name to come into the public domain, however, because it was likely that the injunction barring him from being named would have been successfully challenged by news organisations. “It is in the public interest that there should be public discussion of the circumstances in which it is proper for a chief executive (or other person holding public office or exercising official functions) should be able to carry on a sexual relationship with an employee in the same organisation,” he said. “It is in the public interest that newspapers should be able to report upon cases which raise a question as to what should or should not be a standard in public life.” •

Posted by on June 9, 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.