Yahoo Finance Daniel Morgan inquiry highlights murky links between police and media
The Daniel Morgan inquiry reveals no shortage of disturbing material about key elements of the Met police, the Murdoch press stable, in particular the cut-throat News of the World, and even some of the newspaper’s fiercest rivals.
Confidential police information was routinely for sale for tabloid stories – for two decades from the late 1980s – while senior Met officers entertained cosy relations with key executives, sometimes obtaining plum jobs after they retired from the force.
At the heart was Southern Investigations, the south London firm of private investigators, where Morgan had worked when he was killed. From the late 1980s, it was run by his former partner Jonathan Rees and Sidney Fillery, a former Catford police officer, who had been friendly with Rees for several years before.
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Money poured in from selling information, starting in the era before phone hacking existed. Police intelligence cited in the panel report accuses both of being “deeply involved in corruption, using a network of serving and retired police officers to access sensitive intelligence”.
Police officers were paid between £500 and £2,000 “for stories about celebrities, politicians, and the royal family, as well as police investigations” according to a former Met assistant commissioner Bob Quick, with Southern Investigations acting, in the words of the panel, as “a hub of corruption” in between.
Yet, Rees was one of those charged with Morgan’s murder in 1989, and he remained under suspicion and was charged again 2008. Each time the prosecutions ultimately collapsed. Fillery, meanwhile, arrested once in the aftermath of Morgan’s gruesome car park killing, was on the fringes of the original investigation, before being removed because of his relationship with Rees.
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Whatever the complexities, it was a relationship that was clearly useful to both sides. A former bookkeeper at Southern Investigations said between April 1987 and 1989 the News of the World was invoiced “up to 500 times month”.
Other police data collated in 2000, and published by the inquiry panel, showed that of 273 transactions involving Southern, 79% were with the Mirror Group and 21% with the News of the World, via an executive, Alex Marunchak.
The problem for the News of the World, in particular, was that the relationship could not ultimately be concealed, particularly after the second prosecution of Rees and two others collapsed in 2011 – allowing reporters to reveal details of his work for the tabloid that had emerged in pre-trial proceedings.
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It was the time of the growing phone hacking crisis, and demonstrated again the lengths the Murdoch-owned tabloid was prepared to go to try to obtain information. Such was the growing scandal that the paper was closed later that year. One of its former editors, Andy Coulson, went to jail for five months in 2014 on hacking-related offences.
And it raised questions – repeated forcefully in the panel report – about the decision of former senior Met officers to take jobs writing a column in Murdoch’s papers, particularly Lord Stevens, the former Met commissioner, who went on to write for the News of the World after his retirement in 2005.
The panel had no choice but to re-examine these uncomfortable issues, even though much was examined in court cases and during the first part of the Leveson inquiry in 2012, because of the sprawling consequences of the Met’s failure to resolve the Daniel Morgan case.
In doing so, its report serves as a reminder of what can happen when police, the press and the criminal underworld are allowed to become too close. It was, the panel concluded, simply “a form of corruption”, an uncomfortable period that should not be quickly be forgotten.
