A solicitor who approved a private investigator’s contested confession of bugging, phone tapping and hacking on behalf of the publisher of the Daily Mail did not oversee the document being signed, the high court has heard.
The most serious allegations of unlawful information-gathering against Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL) came from a signed statement made by the private investigator Gavin Burrows.
It alleged an array of lawbreaking on behalf of the publisher, including bugging, phone hacking, landline tapping and the “blagging” of private records and medical information. ANL denies all the allegations.
Four of the seven claimants in the case – Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, as well as the actors Liz Hurley and Sadie Frost – have pointed to the significance of Burrows’s alleged confessions.
Allegations include the tapping of Hurley’s phone, the bugging of her home and the hacking of a phone belonging to John and Furnish’s gardener.
However, Burrows now says the witness statement outlining his alleged confessions was forged.
Giving evidence at the trial, Anjlee Sangani, the solicitor who signed off the document as being drawn up in accordance with normal legal practices, confirmed she had not been responsible for asking Burrows to sign it.
Her signature effectively confirms the witness was not asked leading questions in preparing their statement, and did not have any improper pressure put upon them.
Sangani, who no longer represents any of the claimants, confirmed she had “delegated” the task of ensuring Burrows signed the document to Graham Johnson, a former phone hacker who has since researched unlawful press activities and became a researcher for the claimants’ legal team.
ANL’s legal team is suggesting that the Burrows statement was primarily drawn up by Johnson. It claims Sangani could not have been certain all the information came from Burrows’s own words.
Antony White, the lead barrister for ANL, told Sangani that she had had “limited involvement” in the formation of the alleged confession, dated August 2021.
Sangani rejected that, stating she had been closely involved in the formation of Burrows’s statement. She said she had met Burrows five times in March of that year to discuss his evidence.
She said she had been “uncomfortable and frightened” of Burrows during one of the meetings. “[Burrows] was aware of the purpose … of his witness statement at all times,” she said.
In written submissions, she said Johnson had “kept me informed” when it came to Burrows signing his witness statement.
She said she had seen an email exchange between Johnson and Burrows’s wife asking for Burrows to sign, and a further email from Burrows that contained the signed statement.
“I then signed the certificate of compliance upon checking and viewing Mr Burrows’s electronic signature and the contents of his email to Mr Johnson,” she said.
“I am unsure whether the defendant is alleging I forged Mr Burrows’s signature. If this is the case, it is plainly wrong. If the defendant is alleging Mr Johnson forged the signature, that is not even remotely possible.”
The claimants’ legal team claim the way in which Burrows had digitally signed his witness statement “made it impossible for Mr Johnson to have somehow switched it for a forged document, or to have altered the electronic signature it bore when it was sent by Mr Burrows”.
Sangani said she had drafted the witness statement from Johnson’s memos of his meetings with Burrows, an affidavit by Burrows himself, a signed four-page note by Burrows and a signed table of unlawful articles.
Sangani said the latter two documents had been “wet signed” in front of her at the end of March 2021.
“It was a question of taking the key structure that Mr Burrows had given and then adding the flesh to the bones,” she said. “And that was always done in Mr Burrows’s own words, I can assure you of that.”
It remains unclear whether Burrows will be questioned during the trial, though the judge has said the chances of that happening are “diminishing by the day”. Burrows is abroad and will give evidence from a secret location.
The trial continues.
