Telecom still has leaked paper

Telecom says it still has a copy of the Cabinet paper that was leaked to it but has destroyed several copies it made.

Telecom spokesman John Goulter today issued a statement, saying the company wished to clarify "any confusion" over the status of the documents leaked to it earlier this week.

Mr Goulter said early this morning that the Cabinet paper had been destroyed.

He now says: "Copies that were made have been destroyed, in line with legal advice.

"One document was kept in line with legal advice and will be returned to the Government when we receive directions from the State Services Commission."

The commission is carrying out an inquiry into the leak, which Telecom has said it will co-operate fully with.

Mr Goulter said the company made two or three copies of the Cabinet paper leaked to it, and these had been destroyed.

It had kept the original given to it, he said.

Earlier today, he said the Cabinet paper had been destroyed yesterday.

About four or five people at Telecom had seen it, he said.

National MP Bill English, a senior minister in the previous government, said destroying the Cabinet paper would hamper the investigation.

Mr Goulter disputed that.

Mr Goulter, asked earlier whether Telecom had considered that by destroying the paper it could hamper the inquiry, said the inquiry was not a factor in the paper being destroyed.

Telecom destroyed it "because our legal advice was that the document had not been intended for us so the best thing we could do would be to destroy the document and give the Government an assurance that that is what we'd done so that there could be no question that the document would go any further".

"It was a hard copy, it wasn't an email or a fax copy so there were no markings at all on it that would indicate where it had come from or anything like that," he said.

To his knowledge, the copy had no identifying numbers.

Telecom destroyed the documents the day after the Government released the material when it learned of the leak.

"As we have told the Government, Telecom will co-operate fully with any investigation," Mr Goulter said in his statement.

He would not say if he knew where the leak had come from.

- NZPA