London police are looking into claims that the Washington Post’s new CEO, Will Lewis, was involved in the mass cover-up of phone hacking by British tabloids back in 2011.
The probe was revealed on Wednesday by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who served as prime minister from 2007 to 2010, in an opinion piece for the Guardian newspaper.
The hacking scandal involved the now-defunct tabloid News of the World, once owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
In June, Brown urged police to investigate Lewis – accusing him of overseeing the destruction of millions of emails and other evidence relevant to the case, while serving as an executive for Murdoch’s UK company.
The Washington Post has since confirmed that British police have set up a “special enquiry team” to examine Brown’s allegations.
Investigations, some of which date back to 2005, concluded that News of the World employees tapped the phones of celebrities, politicians, members of the British royal family, and ordinary citizens in pursuit of stories. They were even found to have hacked the phone of a schoolgirl who had gone missing and was later found murdered.
The revelations sparked a public outcry and a trial, that resulted in several high-profile resignations, including that of Murdoch as News Corporation director, and the closure of the paper in 2011.
Brown, who believes he was a target of tabloid hacking during his time as prime minister, has said he experienced first-hand “the journalistic techniques” employed by Will Lewis – who became the Washington Post’s publisher and CEO in January this year.
Lewis previously held numerous high-profile editorial positions in the British media. He was hired by Murdoch’s News International as group general manager in September 2010 and acted as a chief liaison to the police.
Brown claims that Lewis attempted to mislead the police in 2011 by accusing him of conspiring to “steal” millions of emails relevant to the phone hacking investigation.
“He tried to blame me by explaining to the police that he had been told that I… was conspiring to steal these emails. The Murdoch team implied I had bribed one of their former employees to do so,” Brown wrote.
“Blazoned across the top of every edition of the Washington Post is the statement, ‘Democracy dies in darkness’,” Brown continued. “But what if the publisher himself is a master of the dark arts?”
Murdoch’s company has denied allegations that it deleted emails to conceal evidence, blaming an upgrade of an email system for the mass disappearance of messages.
At the time, Lewis told police that the emails were removed after an unsubstantiated tip claimed that Brown was plotting to steal them.
Lewis conceded that he had no evidence to back up the tip and could never corroborate it.
Murdoch has for decades led a vast media empire encompassing leading outlets in the US, the UK and Australia through his company News Corp. His media holdings included Fox News, Sky News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Sun, and The Times.
The 93-year-old mogul stepped down last year as chairman of News Corp, and was replaced by his son Lachlan.