Lawyer fined for missing phone-hacking email in News International review
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Version 0 of 1. A lawyer who worked for News International has been fined £20,000 after a tribunal found that he failed to read an email containing evidence of widespread phone hacking at the News of the World because he was asleep when it was sent. Lawrence Abramson, who was asked by the firm to carry out a review to determine whether or not there was any evidence of criminality at the now-defunct paper, acted “unprofessionally”, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal found on Tuesday. The tribunal said that his failure to read the information sent to him led him to advise News International – falsely – that the company had a clean bill of health. However, the tribunal also found that Abramson, who was working for the law firm Harbottle & Lewis, made a genuine mistake and did not act as part of a deliberate cover-up. In 2007, he was tasked with carrying out an independent review into claims by the paper’s former royal editor Clive Goodman that he was not the only person at the paper involved in phone hacking – and that the practice was sanctioned. Goodman had recently been sacked after being jailed for phone hacking. The information that Lawrence read led him to dismiss Goodman’s claims in a formal letter to senior management. The advice was then relied upon by News International as it insisted that phone hacking was not widespread. When it emerged in 2011 that the evidence was there, Tom Watson MP made a formal complaint to the Solicitors Regulation Authority and it was subsequently decided that they should face the tribunal. Abramson admitted that he “acted in such a way as to compromise or impair his proper standard of work”. The tribunal accepted that his “failure to see [the] email was due to genuine, major, but inadvertent oversight”. But it said that there were, nevertheless, still options open to him to correct his mistake, none of which he took. In its judgment, the tribunal said: “[Abramson] could have asked for the hard copy emails to be couriered to his home, or he could have asked for the content of the emails to be copied and pasted into a Word document or some other format which he could view on his Blackberry. “In his evidence. [Abramson] mentioned that he had been in contact with his temporary secretary during the course of the morning on several occasions. This option was therefore one that he had already used that day. “If she was not in the office for some reason after he awoke from his sleep, he could perhaps have asked one of the other secretaries or members of the review team to update him on what was happening. In short, [he] was not without options.” The tribunal accepted evidence that Abramson missed the email in part because it was not clearly marked as containing important information relevant to his review and because he was in the midst of a particularly busy and stressful time. He was also found not to have compromised his independence or integrity. None of the allegations against News International’s former in-house lawyer Jon Chapman was found to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. News Corp declined to comment. |