Day 44, Part 3 Only a tiny proportion of the material found on computers stashed in the underground car park of Chelsea Harbour belonged to Rebekah Brooks, the phone hacking trial heard today.
In evidence on the allegation Mrs Brooks and her husband hid the computers from police on the weekend she was arrested in July 2011, the Old Bailey was told the results of police forensic analysis of two laptops found behind a bin.
Giving evidence, Detective Sergeant Hayley Broom, of the Met’s Operation Sasha, said that the contents of the laptops appeared to be predominantly Charlie Brooks’s.
A Sony Vaio containing 7,578 emails, 1,270 Microsoft documents and 7,061 other files appeared to have been used solely by Mr Brooks, she said. (Mr Brooks’s lawyer Neil Saunders told the court the machine also had 25 images of “female nudity,” which he described.)
The police officer said analysis of the Apple laptop, which carried a News International tag and had a user account called “Rebekah”, suggested “predominant use” by Mr Brooks. Pictures marked KRM in Corfu – a reference to Rupert Murdoch – were also present.
So too were four documents that appeared to have been originated by Mrs Brooks while she was chief executive of News International between 2009 and 2011.
One was a three-year business plan for News International, headed News International NCEA Budget Briefing and dated 22 March 2010, which contained budgets for the Sun, The Times and other newspapers.
Another was a draft of a speech.
The third was a share scheme calculation for Mrs Brooks.
The fourth was titled: “Draft editorial for approval by JRM [James Murdoch]”. That editorial – which lamented the Labour Party’s “failure” to fix the country’s problems – was printed on a Sun front-page in September 2009 headlined “Labour’s Lost It”, when the paper ended its decade-long support of the party.
The case is expected to hear further evidence about data storage and retrieval tomorrow.
Mr Brooks, Mrs Brooks and News International’s head of security, Mark Hanna, deny conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
The case continues.
Further Reports of Day 44:
- Police officer arrested for leaks to the Guardian, phone-hacking trial hears, James Doleman, The Drum
- Phone-hacking trial: Ownership of computers questioned and police accused of ‘bias‘, James Doleman, The Drum
- Phone-hacking trial: Brooks email on Milly Dowler revealed, BBC News.
- Brooks ‘sought James Murdoch’s approval for Sun’s backing of Tories’, Nick Davies, Guardian
- Rebekah Brooks ‘asked Times editor for sourcing of Milly Dowler story‘, Lisa O’Carroll, Guardian
A full Round Up of tweets and links can be found on the #pressreform blog, “Phone Hacking Trial, Day 44″
Reblogged this on Vox Political.
Reblogged this on David Hencke and commented:
So the recovered laptops from Chelsea Harbour were used by Charlie Brooks – hence 25 female nude pix, and hol snaps of Rupert Murdoch in Corfu. The file showing James Murdoch had to approve switching The Sun’s support from Labour to the Tories is the most politically interesting – thought News International always said its editors were independent!