By Jonathan Browning - Dec 13, 2011 10:46 PM GMT+0700
News Corp. Deputy Chief Operating Officer James Murdoch received an e-mail in 2008 that described the “nightmare scenario” that phone hacking went beyond a single reporter at the News of the World tabloid.
The e-mail from former editor Colin Myler contained previous exchanges between two lawyers that referred to transcripts of voicemail messages, according to documents released today by the U.K. Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee.
Murdoch told lawmakers last month that Myler never told him in 2008 that phone hacking at the newspaper was widespread. Revelations that the News of the World hacked into phones of celebrities, politicians and a murdered schoolgirl led to the closing of the 168-year-old tabloid.
“Unfortunately it is as bad as we feared,” Myler told Murdoch in the 2008 e-mail.
Murdoch said in a separate letter to U.K. lawmakers that he didn’t review the full e-mail.
In another statement today, Murdoch said that he reviewed the e-mail for two minutes on a Saturday when he was not in the office. “As I have always said, I was not aware of evidence of widespread wrongdoing or the need for further investigation.”
Lawyers for News Corp. (NWSA)’s News International unit said in the e-mail chain that a lawsuit had uncovered “the nightmare scenario” of a document that contained transcripts of voicemail messages. The e-mail in the lawsuit contained a summary of 35 messages and has become a focal point of the phone-hacking probe.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan Browning in London at jbrowning9@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net
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