I have copied a reporting, or parts of, of the preliminary hearing which explains my thinking re evidence not just being 1 man’s statement:
*Responding to the claimants’ assertion that they were only able to bring the case once there was enough evidence to do so, counsel for Associated, Adrian Beltrami KC, found himself insisting at some length that they had grounds to be suspicious of his client years and years ago.
While reminding the court that Associated denied all the allegations against it, he took the judge through a catalogue of evidence, some of it from as long ago as the early 2000s, which he said might reasonably have given the claimants grounds to sue at a far earlier date.
Even as senior Associated executives told the Leveson Inquiry of 2011-12 that they had conducted internal investigations and knew for certain there had been no voicemail hacking, Mr Beltrami pointed out, the claimants – some of whom have already sued other papers for hacking – might have paid attention to numerous published claims and insinuations that Mail and Mail on Sunday journalists had broken the law.
This is a preliminary hearing, not a trial, and the Mail, or rather its owner Associated Newspapers Ltd, has been asking the court to strike out parts of the claims against it – made by Sir Elton John, Prince Harry, Baroness Doreen Lawrence and four others – on the grounds that they rely on documents it believes should be legally confidential.
These documents, referred to in court as ‘the ledgers’, were compiled by Associated itself and submitted to the 2011-12 Leveson Inquiry into press standards. They give a detailed picture of the dealings that the Mail and Mail on Sunday had with private investigators from 2005 until 2007 or later.
They name several private investigators as well as numerous journalists who commissioned work from them or who received the products of their work, and they also identify sums of money paid by the newspapers. Such evidence is obviously relevant to the cases of each of the seven complainants, who allege that the newspapers used private investigators to invade their privacy illegally.
Associated argues that because the ledgers were submitted to the inquiry on a promise of confidentiality confirmed by one or more legal ‘restriction orders’, and because they were never released to the public by the inquiry, the claimants should not be allowed to rely on them in their claim.
One problem with this is that significant parts of the ledgers have already been published. Acquired by an investigative journalist in 2017, they provided a basis for a number of articles published by an online media organisation which, the court has ordered, may not be named at this stage. That is how they came to the notice of the claimants*