Prince Harry appeared to call for criminal proceedings to be launched against Will Lewis, the embattled Washington Post CEO handpicked by owner Jeff Bezos after he won a stunning victory over Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) on Wednesday.
Lewis was put in charge of cleaning up the phone hacking mess for NGN in 2011, and has been accused of being involved in the mass deletion of 30 million emails. Since being appointed as CEO and publisher of the Post he has presided over a collapse in readership and subscriptions.
Although Lewis was not named in a statement made after the settlement was announced on behalf of Harry and his co-plaintiff, former British lawmaker Tom Watson, he appeared to be clearly in its sights, not least because he was due to be accused of playing a pivotal role in the cover up if the case had gone ahead.
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Harry’s statement said: “Senior executives deliberately obstructed justice by deleting over 30 million emails, destroying back-up tapes, and making false denials—all in the face of an on-going police investigation. They then repeatedly lied under oath to cover their tracks—both in court and at the Leveson Public Inquiry… Far from being relics of a distant past, many of those behind these unlawful practices remain firmly entrenched in senior positions today, both within News UK and other media outlets across the world, wielding editorial power and perpetuating the toxic culture in which they continue to thrive.”
Britain’s Metropolitan Police said there were “no active police investigations into allegations of phone hacking or related matters” after Harry and Watson called for “the police and Parliament to investigate not only the unlawful activity now finally admitted, but the perjury and cover ups along the way.”
It is not hard to identify Lewis as one of the people Harry has in mind as deserving police attention, given that he was involved in deleting the emails and still wields enormous power in the media world.
As the Daily Beast reported yesterday, Harry was set to accuse Lewis of having “instigated and authorized” a cover-up of “endemic” illegality at U.K. tabloid The Sun.
Indeed, Lewis’ own newspaper, where he is widely reviled, reported that skeleton arguments (which in the event went unused in court), “indicated that Harry and Watson’s legal teams planned to allege that ‘over 30 million emails were deliberately destroyed’ as part of a scheme to keep evidence from police investigators.”
The Washington Post added the skeleton argument alleged that a “pivotal role” in orchestrating the email deletions had been done by none other than Lewis. The WaPo report again seemed to have Lewis in mind when it noted that the settlement would “help insulate current and former NGN executives who had been accused by Harry and Watson of participating in an alleged coverup.”
NGN has always maintained that emails were deleted as part of a change to data retention policy, and no laws were broken. NGN’s apology to Harry reiterated this point, saying there was no “admission of any illegality” over their “regrettable” response to the arrests of their reporters linked to the phone hacking scandal.
However, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has previously accused Lewis of trying to mislead British detectives, and justify the deletion of emails, by telling them that Brown and Watson were behind a plot to steal the emails of senior NGN executives.
Brown wrote in the Guardian: “I have only recently discovered how Lewis attempted to accuse me of a crime I did not commit.”
