Rebekah Brooks's PA told police she disposed of 30 of her own notebooks

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/07/rebebak-brooks-pa-cheryl-carter-notebooks

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Rebekah Brooks's secretary told police she threw out or recycled 30 notebooks in the seven boxes of archived material she retrieved from the News International archive just days before the News of the World closed.

Cheryl Carter, who has been charged with one count of conspiring to pervert the course of justice in relation to the alleged concealment of the boxes, says that the notebooks belonged to her and related to a beauty column she wrote for another News International title, the Sun.

In a police interview played to the jury in the hacking trial on Tuesday, she said all the material she found belonging to Brooks's was returned to her boss's office including memorabilia, notebooks, and some pictures. "I flicked through the notebooks, if it was my writing I threw it out, if it was Rebekah's, I returned it," Carter told police.

She told Detective Sergeant John Massey she asked for the boxes to be sent from the company archive on 8 July 2011, after she had received two phone calls from the archivist, Nick Mays, telling her they were downsizing the storage and they needed to collect the boxes which had been stored since 2009.

In a third interview Carter was told of discrepancies between her account of what happened in the run-up to the removal of the boxes and that of the archivist Mays.

"I did not call Cheryl Carter to remove those seven boxes from the archive because of moving offices and cannot give an explanation as to why any of my colleagues would do so," the News International archive told police in a statement read out to Carter.

She was told that Mays was "never under any belief that there was an instruction to start emptying the archive because of a move of location".

Carter responds that she is "quite clear" that she received two phone calls from him. Carter says she is "certain" that Mays had called about an instruction to downsize.

She said she was aware of the police investigation into phone hacking but did not discuss it with Brooks or that she may be facing arrest.

Carter said both she and Brooks's other secretary Deborah Keegan had a laugh at the time of the original call from Mays which was in April or May 2011 because there was nowhere to store material in the company's new HQ in Thomas More Square, Wapping, in east London.

"Deb and I both laughed to ourselves and said 'For fuck's sake, where are we going to put it?'"

She said she did not do anything about the boxes until months later, on a day when Brooks was on holiday.

"My recollection is that Nick Mays … called Deborah Keegan and I sometime I believe in April, a while before the News of the World shut and phone us … but said to us we are downsizing our archive and you need to remove some of the boxes you have," she told police in an interview under caution in January 2012.

She said she eventually got them sent to Wapping on 8 July, two days before the News of the World was due to close, because she knew Brooks had a week's holiday booked when she planning a bootcamp at her Oxfordshire home.

"I had it in my mind that that would be the time I could leave my desk without Rebekah asking where I was going, why I was leaving my desk," she said.

Carter worked for Brooks for 16 years and described her relationship as "very good" and said she was "a good, fair boss to me".

Earlier on Tuesday, the jury heard how Carter's son, Nick, who was also working at News International, had collected the boxes and taken them to her Essex home after they arrived from Enfield on 8 July.

She went through the boxes at her leisure some days later and found most of the contents were her notepads.

"When I got home, as well as the seven boxes I received, there were three big pictures.

"I put them in the conservatory and went through box by box and just looked through each one, and I noticed that there was three of Rebekah's pads there. There was one diary, there was some photographs and there was some speeches."

She said she took Brooks's belongings to the office but was never asked about them when her office was sealed for a police search a week later after the former News International chief executive resigned.

Carter told police the boxes were collected following two phone calls from the company archivist and there was no specific urgency to deal with them on 8 July. She was questioned under caution on 6 January 2012.

At the start of the second interview on that day she broke down in tears after her lawyer started by making a complaint to police that news of her arrest had been leaked to the BBC.

"I just didn't want my kids to find out, you know," Carter was heard saying.

The jury also heard Carter tell police that personal effects including bank statements belonging to Brooks were crated up under supervision after her resignation and taken to her mother-in-law's house because she didn't have enough room in her garage.

She broke down in tears a second time when asked about her relationship with Brooks. She told them how Brooks had been good to her son and got him a Saturday job when he was going through a difficult time when he was 15 years old.

Carter later took the eight or 10 crates of Brooks's personal effects to her Oxfordshire home, the jury heard.

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