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Monday 25 July 2011

'Britain: more corrupt than you think'

The scandal over hacking the phones of UK citizens continues to take toll after it was revealed the illegal practice was exercised at the Daily Mirror too.


Former journalists on the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror -- the main tabloid competitors to Rupert Murdoch's media empire - said illegal hacking of voicemails was widespread at their papers and “seen as a bit of a wheeze”, the daily The Independent reported. 

They voiced readiness to give evidence to a public inquiry into the hacking scandal ordered by Prime Minister David Cameron and headed by Lord Justice Brian Leveson, according to the report. 

James Hipwell, 45, a former Daily Mirror financial journalist jailed in 2005 for buying shares before tipping them in the paper, said he heard hacking was being used because he worked next to the showbusiness desk where it was rife. 

"You know what people around you are doing", he told The Independent newspaper. 

"They would call a celebrity with one phone and when it was answered they would then hang up. By that stage the other phone would be into their (the celebrity's) voicemail and they would key in the code", he said, adding that "there was a great hilarity about it." 

Hipwell worked at the Mirror for two years until 2000 when it was under the editorship of Piers Morgan, himself a former News of the World editor. Hipwell was sacked by the Mirror over the so-called "City Slickers" scandal. 

Separately the BBC quoted an unidentified former Sunday Mirror journalist who worked on the paper in the past decade and claimed to have witnessed routine phone hacking in the newsroom. 

British politicians very much like to lecture the world about integrity and the rule of law, but the News of the World phone hacking scandal has laid bare a web of collusion between money, power, media and the police. 

The scandal engulfing Rupert Murdoch's media empire has already destroyed a newspaper, cost two top police officers their jobs, seen the arrest of powerful media figures and embarrassed the prime minister and political elite. 

Murdoch ordered the weekly tabloid, which was the biggest selling English language newspaper in the world, closed on July 7 amid public outrage after 168 years of publication. 

Far from the innocent, Britain is showing a seamy side that anti-corruption campaigners say is getting worse and may be politically explosive as society becomes more unequal due to the financial and economic crises. 

Behind a facade of probity, London offers a safe haven for oligarchs and despots, a place where foreign media magnates have bought access to and influence over the government. 

Although the UK government claims it has been promoting its legal system and regulatory, but some of the world's prominent transparency campaigners say that the hacking scandal exemplifies unhealthy links between power and money. 

"The bottom line... is that for some time there has been undue influence on UK governments and public policy by powerful private interests," says Daniel Kaufmann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC. 

"It is ... often a more sophisticated form of high-level political corruption. It may not be strictly illegal -- or it may be more subtle -- but that does not mean it is not very costly for society or the economy," said Kaufman, a former director of the World Bank Institute and creator of the closely watched Worldwide Governance Indicators. 

"London has become the money launderers' destination of choice," says John Christensen, a former economic adviser to the Channel island of Jersey, who now runs the Tax Justice Network, a group campaigning for tighter regulation. 

When power elites in the Middle East looked for somewhere to send their money during the "Arab Spring" uprisings this year, wealth managers proposed London as the prime beneficiary. 

Even groups such as Transparency International (TI) -- which has traditionally focused on criticizing "conventionally" corrupt states in emerging economies -- are beginning to shift their attention to developed world corruption. 

TI published a report earlier this month entitled "Britain: more corrupt than you think", showing that a majority of people believed corruption was worsening in the country. 

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