Something tells me the people with deep pockets who had their phones hacked might not sit back quietly. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has to be bracing for expensive lawsuits and rightly so. How much more bad news can his brand take? It's not what it used to be.
Victims of the phone-hacking scandal were last night taking legal advice following the Guardian's revelations over News Group's secret £1m payout.
The football agent Sky Andrew said: "After being told certain individuals have taken legal action, I will take advice."
Speaking from Barcelona, on business, he said he was surprised by the apparent scale of the hacking. He suspected his phone had been tampered with when his pin number no longer worked. "When you are in an industry like mine, you suspect this type of thing could go on, but you don't actually expect it to happen to you."
Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator working for News International, was jailed in 2007 for accessing Andrew's voicemails after a trial that also saw a former royal editor of the News of the World, Clive Goodman, jailed for hacking into the voicemails of royal aides.
But News Group has never publicly admitted any responsibility for Mulcaire's actions, which also saw the hacking of phones belonging to the model Elle Macpherson, the Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, publicist Max Clifford, and the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, Gordon Taylor.
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