Operation Elveden: DPP Alison Saunders faces calls to resign after Sun journalists Chris Pharo and Jamie Pyatt acquitted
Operation Elveden began shortly after the 2011 scandal over phone-hacking at News of the World
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The Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, is facing calls to resign after the acquittal of two Sun journalists in the final trial resulting from a controversial police investigation into payments to public officials for stories.
The Metropolitan Police’s Operation Elveden involved 80 police officers but only one of the subsequent 29 prosecutions resulted in a conviction. After being cleared, the former news editor of The Sun, Chris Pharo, questioned the “public interest” in millions of pounds of public money being spent on prosecuting journalists for “doing their job”.
Mr Pharo said: “I want to ask one simple question: how could anyone imagine spending more than £30 million over four years prosecuting journalists for doing their job was remotely in the public interest?”
The former Sun district reporter Jamie Pyatt, who was also cleared, called for Ms Saunders to “consider her position”. He said: “The head has finally been chopped off the Elveden dragon. It’s gone. It should never have been there in the first place. It’s disgraceful.”
Operation Elveden began shortly after the 2011 scandal over phone-hacking at News International’s former tabloid the News of the World and most of those charged were from The Sun, the paper’s sister publication. The Sun’s former crime reporter Anthony France was the only journalist convicted by a jury. By contrast, 26 public officials have been convicted following the £20 million police inquiry.
Following a retrial at the Old Bailey, Pharo, 46, and Pyatt, 52, were found not guilty on 15 October of aiding and abetting a Surrey police officer to commit misconduct in a public office between 2002 and 2011.
The jury, which deliberated for nearly 12 hours on its verdict, was not told the officer at the heart of the case, Simon Quinn, had pleaded guilty to the offence and been jailed for 18 months earlier this year.
The News International paper trail showed Quinn, referred to in court as “2044”, had received some £10,000 for tips on high-profile criminal investigations, including the murder of schoolgirl Milly Dowler, “trophy rapist” Tony Imiela and quadruple killer Daniel Gonzalez.
Pyatt insisted that the information he received was all in the “public interest”. The reporter said he was “given” the police officer as a contact by the Sun news desk and everything he did was “sanctioned” by the paper. Mr Pyatt’s lawyer Nigel Rumfitt QC told the court there had been a “monumental error of judgment in pursuing the case” against his client.
The reporter called for Mr France’s conviction to be reviewed. “I wish the Court of Appeal judges see sense that Anthony cannot be responsible for the payment policy of a global media giant. He is an innocent man and deserves to have his good name back.”
Pharo told jurors his only involvement was valuing some of Pyatt’s stories and passing the reporter’s requests for cash payments to his Surrey police source up the editorial chain for authorisation.
He complained that his former boss Rebekah Brooks was “back in her job” as chief executive while he was answering questions in court. He revealed to jurors that Mrs Brooks, who became editor of The Sun in 2003, had a punch bag in her office to “relieve tension”, and would “explode” in editorial meetings and “sulk for days” over missed stories.
After the Old Bailey verdict, the Crown Prosecution Service released a statement which said: “The case was allowed by the judge to progress to a full trial and we respect the verdict of the jury today. This case in particular involved allegations of multiple payments to a corrupt public official in areas where the public should generally expect confidentiality.”