Prince Harry lawyers told to disclose details of payments to witnesses in Mail trial

[My2cents1975]

The judge said: “I am satisfied that documents, held by the claimants, that can support a case that a witness has been paid or offered other inducement for their evidence (whether directly or indirectly) should be disclosed. That is because there is a real prospect that Associated will be able to rely upon this evidence to attack the credibility of such witnesses.”

He added: “The stance adopted by the claimants has been undermined by their inconsistent and incoherent approach to disclosure of documents relating to payments to potential witnesses and/or other inducements…

Graham Johnson’s payments for media projects and Mail litigation
The Mail notes that the claimants have relied on evidence provided by investigative journalist Graham Johnson, who has written extensively about illegal tabloid newsgathering for Byline Times.

The judgment notes that this was confirmed by Johnson in a Press Gazette interview published on 5 March when he said: “The Mail litigation is almost entirely based on the stories I published on Byline about five years ago.”

Lawyer for Associated Francesca Richmond said: “It appears that Mr Johnson has made arrangements with other third party investigators in order to obtain documents or statements for use both in media projects and in civil litigation against newspapers including the Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday.”

Can’t wait to see how this unfolds

It would be helpful if one of our legal eagles can help us make sense of this story that has sent H&M's superfans into "Squirrel" mode over the Natasha nothingburger.

As you said, @My2cents1975, we really could do with someone to explain this to us, because on the face of things it looks questionable at best

There's also the part that says "The Court found that the Claimants had not adequately disclosed documents held by their Research Team", and I thought that claimants had to disclose everything they had - at least in criminal trials, which I realise this isn't

Yes the CPIA in criminal proceedings means that everything should be disclosed even if it undermines the case but not sure if the same in civil proceedings

Very interesting! Great thread op! 👍

Is the fool still taking legal action? His money must rapidly be running out. No wonder he’s wanting to reconcile with the RF. 🙄

Yes, under the Civil Procedure Rules you have to disclose documents on which you rely, documents that adversely affect your or another party's case, and documents that support another party's case.

That’s called standard disclosure. If you think another party has relevant documents they haven’t disclosed you can ask for an order for specific disclosure, as has been done here.

Interesting how this is now buried beneath all the publicity of a possible 'reconciliation'. Looks like Meredith Maines is earning her salary in the war room this month !!

@Serensterwould ANL have to have a reasonable basis for believing this something might be amiss to get a judge to agree to this?

This feels like it could be quite explosive. Is it saying that Harry’s team might have bribed witnesses to provide evidence against ANL?

Yes, you’d need to have some evidence to persuade the judge that there are additional relevant documents that haven’t been disclosed, but should be.

And not bribed witnesses, no. Paid witnesses. Which is relevant because obviously that presents a witness (any witness) with a conflict of interest, which should be taken into account when the court assesses their evidence. If you are paying a former police officer a large amount of money to come up with evidence of illegal information gathering, then you can argue that he is obviously strongly motivated to find something rather than nothing…