‘Murdoch papers paid off UK officials’

Metropolitan police deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers, who is leading three operations regarding the phone hacking said that the News International’s Sun newspaper has operated a culture of illegal payments that were approved “at a very senior level within the newspaper” and engaged “frequent and sometimes significant sums of money.”

“The current assessment is that it reveals a network of corrupted officials,” Akers told the inquiry led by Justice Brian Leveson.

“There appears to have been a culture at the Sun of illegal payments, and systems have been created to facilitate those payments whilst hiding the identity of officials receiving the money,” she added.

She also said that one public official received £80,000 over years, and one journalist was given £150,000 over a number of years in order to pay for information to their sources, “a number of whom were public officials.”

Akers’ remarks came only a day after Murdoch launched a Sunday edition of the Sun to move on from the hacking scandal and replace the defunct News of the World tabloid.

Akers also told the inquiry that ten journalists at the Sun had been arrested, including senior editors and respected journalists. She also said that a number of police officers and a member of the Ministry of Defence and a member of the armed forces had been arrested over allegations of receiving bribes from the Sun journalists.

SAB/HE

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