Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Sir Christopher Meyer, Martin Moore, Julian Petley, and John Kampfner—Oral evidence
(QQ 404–444)
current crisis, last night I totted up how much News International had already spent on the
phone hacking affair. If you take into account the £700,000 paid to Gordon Taylor; the
reported £1 million paid to Max Clifford; the £3 million to the Dowlers; the £20 million civil
litigation fund, which will probably be considerably exceeded; and the initial £7 billion loss in
terms of share value—we have not even started half of that yet—it has cost them an awful
lot of money. Had it invested even a tiny proportion of that in better regulation, it might
not have got into the situation in the first place.
John Kampfner: A lot of this comes down to corporate governance, and those
organisations and their shareholders—they are all private companies—looking after their
own, to use Martin’s term. This has been acutely expensive reputationally and financially.
The two go hand in hand. I wrote a piece in the The Guardian last week in which I said the
issue was corporate governance. The journalism practised by News International,
particularly the News of the World—we may find out that it involves far more newspapers
than that—was a by-product of weak corporate governance, and that is perhaps one area
that this or other committees might want to look into.
Chairman: If there are no more questions, may I thank the four of you very
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