LONDON: Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson would have been incompetent to not know of phone-hacking when they edited Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World amid a “rotten state of affairs”, prosecutors told a London court yesterday.
Brooks, who later ran News Corp.’s British newspaper arm, and Coulson, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s media chief until 2011, are accused of conspiracy to hack mobile phones and authorising illegal payments to public officials.
Brooks also faces a charge of perverting the course of justice by trying to hinder the police inquiry. They deny the accusations.
Murdoch closed the News of the World in 2011 amid a public furore over phone-hacking at the paper, which rocked his media empire, sent shockwaves through Britain’s political establishment and led to Brooks’ resignation.
In his closing speech to London’s Old Bailey court, prosecutor Andrew Edis said top editors would have known their staff were engaged in illegally accessing voicemails on mobile phones if they were doing their jobs properly. He reminded the jury three senior news desk editors had pleaded guilty to phone-hacking charges. They had worked “hand in glove” with Brooks, Coulson and the paper’s managing editor Stuart Kuttner, who is also on trial, Edis added.
“The investigation has clearly proved there was a rotten state of affairs at the top of that organisation,” he said.
“What you have to decide is whether these one or two people above knew of that rotten state of affairs which permeated the organisation they were supposed to be running. REUTERS
