Prince Harry and six other prominent figures are facing a legal bill of up to £50m after losing their case against the publisher of the Daily Mail over claims it used unlawful methods to source stories. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
In an emphatic ruling that is likely to signal an end to new litigation relating to the phone-hacking scandal era, the high court dismissed all the group's claims, stating that the claimants had not proved that any information had been obtained unlawfully.
The 436-page written verdict from Mr Justice Nicklin said the court could not simply infer that a story had been obtained unlawfully if there remained a legitimate and realistic legal way in which it could have been sourced.
Nicklin also dismissed suggestions that senior figures at the Mail, including its former editor Paul Dacre, had lied to the 2011-12 Leveson inquiry into press ethics, where Dacre said no hacking took place at the paper.
The Duke of Sussex – along with Doreen Lawrence, the mother of the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence; the singer Elton John and his husband, David Furnish; the actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost; and the former Liberal Democrat minister Simon Hughes – launched the multimillion-pound case against Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL), which publishes the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and MailOnline.
They accused the publisher of "clear, systematic and sustained use of unlawful information-gathering" over several years. Dozens of journalists and private investigators were named in the group's claims.
Harry and Lawrence said the verdict was a "complete and obvious whitewash, but sadly not altogether unexpected". "When the court says there is not sufficient evidence of wrongdoing … then one does wonder how justice was ever going to be achieved," a joint statement read.
ANL's legal team described the claims as "lurid" and "preposterous". In each instance, it said, stories were sourced legitimately from press officers, previous articles or the "leaky" social circles of celebrities.
Dacre, in a video statement after the verdict, said the case was a "conspiracy" orchestrated by press regulation campaigners to "destroy a paper". He said he would "never be able to comprehend" why Lawrence joined the case, after the Mail had "campaigned for justice for her son for over two decades".
He also said he had sympathy for Harry, whom he described as a "confused and angry young man". He said his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, had "liked the Mail. We were her paper."
ANL will try to recover its costs from the mammoth case. It said the verdict represented "an overwhelming victory for the Daily Mail and its journalists, and for a free press generally".
A spokesperson said: "This is a magnificent vindication of the Daily Mail's journalism. For some of the most outrageous allegations made when the case was launched in a blaze of publicity four years ago – placing bugs in people's cars and homes, listening to calls as they were made and illicitly accessing bank accounts – no credible evidence was ever presented.
"The reputations of our decent and hard-working journalists were terribly impugned, and today they have been exonerated. As the judgment clearly shows, every single article was legitimately sourced."
The group presented the court with 55 articles published between 1997 and 2015, and three incidents that did not lead to articles, that they claimed demonstrated unlawful information-gathering.
A series of extraordinary claims of illegality at the Mail were made by the claimants' legal team, which alleged "habitual and widespread" wrongdoing. They included claims of phone hacking, landline tapping and bugging via private investigators, as well as making corrupt payments to police.
In a comprehensive victory for the publisher, all the claims were dismissed by the court.
The claimants' case was seriously damaged after a key witness, Gavin Burrows, a private investigator turned apparent whistleblower, said before his trial that his witness statement was a forgery and that he had not carried out illegal activity for the Mail titles.
In a stark finding for the claimants' legal team, the judge said he could not reliably conclude that Burrows had said what was in the disowned statement.
In any case, he said, Burrows was "comprehensively undermined" as a witness and there was no independent corroboration for his claims.
During the 11-week trial, dozens of editors and journalists, including Dacre, gave evidence denying illegal activity.
Harry was the first of the claimants to give evidence and said the Mail's titles had made his wife's life "an absolute misery".
The Mail case is the last to be brought against newspaper groups by the prince, who is coincidentally in the UK for a series of charity engagements.