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Coulson denies hearing voicemail hacked from Sienna Miller's phone

29/04/2014

By Martin HickmanAndy Coulson today denied hearing a voicemail that had been hacked from Sienna Miller's phone by one of his reporters, Dan Evans.In his evidence, Evans said he played a phone message left by Daniel Craig on Ms Miller's phone to Mr Coulson and another News International executive in the middle of the News of the World's newsroom.A week after the hacking - which is not disputed - the Sunday tabloid ran a front-page story stating that the actors were having an affair.At the phone hacking trial, Andrew Edis QC, for the Crown asked Mr Coulson: "I'm going to suggest there was a moment when Dan Evans played you a voicemail of Sienna Miller's"."No, it didn't happen," Mr Coulson replied.He denied knowing that when he agreed royal editor Clive Goodman could pay £500-a-week to a new royal source that the source was private detective Glenn Mulcaire, who was hacking phones.Giving evidence for the third week, Mr Coulson told the Old Bailey: "I had put Clive under pressure. He had come up with a suggestion and I was prepared to go with it."He told me it was a source close to the young royals."He was asked a decision taken the same year, 2005, to over-ride an executive's proposal to cancel Mulcaire's £105,000 contract.Mr Edis said: "You must have have known. Who else would do it?""Well, the paper had a number of senior executives, not least the department heads themselves," the former editor replied.Mr Coulson told the court: "I have no memory of being involved in it and I don't think I was involved in it."Asked whether another senior journalist had taken the decision to keep paying Mulcaire, he said: "It's possible that [the other journalist] took the decision. It's possible that a number of other people did, too."Mr Edis asked: "Were you incompetent at your job?".Mr Coulson, who edited the NoW between 2003 and 2007, replied: "I don't think I was incompetent."He, Rebekah Brooks, NoW editor between 2000 and 2003, and Stuart Kuttner, its long-serving managing editor, deny conspiring to hack phones.The case continues.

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