Hacked Off CEO Nathan Sparkes said,

“December's trial judgement laid bare the extraordinary cover-up which has taken place at Mirror Group Newspapers over the last two decades. It paints the picture of a rotten corporate culture, desperate to escape accountability at all costs. Shareholders, employees and pensioners at Reach PLC will today be counting the cost of the wrongdoing which has occurred at the publisher, with Prince Harry's settlement estimated to be worth a further £250k (on top of the £140k the Judge already awarded for a sample of his articles), as well as reported £1m legal costs. Reach also face a separate costs bill for the generic trial expected to exceed £2m. It is now for the police to pursue charges of perjury against any senior employees or ex-employees at the publisher who misled the first part of the Leveson Inquiry in their denials of knowledge of phone hacking. The findings in December's judgment, some of them outlined in Prince Harry's statement today, should not be emerging in the context of a civil trial, so many years after allegations of phone hacking were first made. They should instead have been investigated through the promised Public Inquiry, known as Leveson Part Two, which was cancelled by the Conservative government as a sop to the press. Only such an inquiry is capable of getting to the bottom of this scandal once and for all. These cases serve as yet another reminder of the urgent need for effective and independent regulation of the press to protect the interests of ordinary people who are victims of wrongdoing by powerful and unaccountable newspaper groups”.

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