Hacking inquiry reveals links between top cops and tabloid staff

Two senior Scotland Yard officers who dismissed the true scale of phone hacking at the News of the World had a close relationship with some of its journalists who were later arrested for alleged crimes at the paper, the Leveson Inquiry heard yesterday.

Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner John Yates had eight meetings with Neil Wallis, the paper's deputy editor until 2009, between 2009 and 2010, six while he was looking into alleged phone hacking at Wallis's former paper - none of which was declared in the Metropolitan Police's register of hospitality.

Yates also had meetings with the paper's crime editor, Lucy Panton.

Andy Hayman, the assistant commissioner with oversight of the hacking inquiry in 2006, which prosecuted only the paper's royal editor and its private investigator despite much wider evidence of wrongdoing, also had evening engagements with Wallis and Panton.

After the Met started fresh investigations into the paper, detectives arrested Wallis last July on suspicion of phone hacking and Panton in December on suspicion of police corruption.

In a day of evidence highlighting the intimate professional and personal connections between senior Met staff and Rupert Murdoch's tabloid, the inquiry disclosed the meetings from notes the two officers made in their Scotland Yard diaries.

The inquiry asked Yates about an email sent by News of the World news editor James Mellor to Panton on October 30, 2010, asking her to find out more from him about a bomb found in a printer cartridge on a cargo aircraft.

Mellor wrote: "John Yates could be crucial here.

"Have you spoken to him? Really need an excl splash [exclusive front page] line, so time to call in all those bottles of champagne ..."

Inquiry counsel Robert Jay, QC, was particularly interested in meetings between Wallis and Yates, who in July 2009 decided not to reopen Scotland Yard's investigation into phone hacking after reviewing the progress of the investigation carried out three years earlier.

Giving evidence by video link from Bahrain, where is he helping organise its police force, Mr Yates said Mr Wallis was "certainly a good friend" and had not declared the meals and drinks because they were "private engagements" for which he sometimes footed the bill.

He added that he could not have known at the time that Wallis would become a hacking suspect.

- Independent