Team Blitz India
LONDON: Britain’s Prince William settled a phone-hacking claim against Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper arm for a “huge sum” after a secret deal struck with Buckingham Palace, the heir’s younger brother Prince Harry has said in court documents.
Harry, the younger son of King Charles, is suing Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) at the High Court in London for multiple unlawful acts allegedly committed on behalf of its tabloids, the Sun and the now-defunct News of the World, from the mid-1990s until 2016.
Bid to strike out claim
NGN, which has paid out millions of pounds to settle more than a thousand phone-hacking cases, is trying to strike out Harry’s claim, and that of British actor Hugh Grant, arguing they should have taken action sooner.
Harry railed against senior NGN figures and his own family, whom he has accused of colluding with the press to protect their image, saying a “secret agreement” was struck between Buckingham Palace and senior figures at NGN to avoid embarrassment, according to a 31-page witness statement.
Despite having the backing of the late Queen Elizabeth to take on the Murdoch group, Harry said attempts to get an apology from them had been stonewalled.
The secret agreement
Still, he said NGN had settled William’s claim “for a huge sum of money in 2020… without any of the public being told, and seemingly with some favourable deal in return for him going ‘quietly’ so to speak”. “This goes to prove the existence of this secret agreement between the institution and senior executives at NGN.”
In 2012, Murdoch’s British newspaper group issued an unreserved apology for widespread hacking carried out by journalists at the News of the World, which the media mogul had been forced to shut down amid a backlash, although it still rejects any allegations of wrongdoing at the Sun.
