A long-serving News of the World executive ordered dozens of individuals to be hacked after he left the tabloid, the phone hacking trial heard today.

News editor Greg Miskiw resigned from the NoW to join the Manchester-based Mercury Press news agency in 2005, the Old Bailey was told.

Police analysis shows that after Miskiw's resignation on 1 July 2005, the NoW's voicemail interceptor Glenn Mulcaire recorded Miskiw as being the commissioning journalist on 73 occasions.

The figure was disclosed following Metropolitan Police analysis of Mulcaire's notes, in whose top lefthand corner he would write the first name of the journalist who ordered him to hack into voicemails.

In answer to questions from Andy Coulson's junior, Alison Pople, Operation Weeting's Detective Constable Nicholas Oskiewicz agreed with her that nine of Mulcaire's notes during the period of Mr Coulson's editorship were duplicates.

Mr Coulson's barrister then turned to the "top left" names for Miskiw, who has pleaded guilty to intercept voicemails at an earlier hearing.

The detective agreed that 450 entries in Mulcaire's notebooks referred to Miskiw after he had left the NoW's offices in Wapping and moved to the paper's Manchester office.

Miss Pople asked: "There are also entries that refer to Mr Miskiw after he left?", to which Det Cost Oskiewicz replied: "Yes, that's right."

He said that applied to 73 entries, later agreeing that of the 240 undated notes in the Mulcaire documentation, 206 referred to Miskiw.

Mr Coulson, who edited the News of the World between 2003 and 2007, his former colleague Rebekah Brooks, and the papers's managing editor Stuart Kuttner deny conspiring to hack voicemails.

The Crown's case is expected to conclude this afternoon. The defence case is scheduled to begin a week on Monday, after a week of legal argument.