Rebekah Brooks handed £7m payout for quitting News International

By SCOTT MACNAB
Published on 16/10/2012 12:12

FORMER News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks received a payoff totalling more than £7 million after leaving the newspaper publisher last year.

• Rebekah Brooks given £7m payoff for leaving NI last year

• Call for PM to come clean after reports emerge of missing emails between Brooks and David Cameron

• Reports of missing emails between Cameron and Andy Coulson

• Labour accuse PM of being less than straight-forward

The sum consisted of cash and pension payments as well as an allowance for legal fees and the use of a chauffeur-driven car, it emerged yesterday.

The 44-year-old resigned as chief executive of News International last year. She will

stand trial next year on various charges relating to the phone-hacking scandal. She had been with Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspapers business since 1989.

Her severance deal did contain “substantial” clawback clauses which will entitle News International to recover some of the payment from Brooks “in certain circumstances”, reports yesterday indicated. News International did not comment.

The payout is significantly higher than stated in previous reports of the settlement, which said it was about £1.7 million, and came as the annual general meeting of News Corp, News

International’s parent group, convenes in Los Angeles.

Calpers, the California pension fund, along with fund managers Hermes and Legal & General, are voting against Mr Murdoch’s re-appointment as chairman of News Corp.

Brooks resigned in July last year amid a widening of the probe into phone-hacking at NI. This came after Mr Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corp, backed her publicly to stay in the role.

Meanwhile, Downing Street has insisted the Leveson Inquiry was handed all communications between David Cameron and Brooks that were requested, amid claims that there is a

further tranche of unpublished e-mails and texts between them.

The Prime Minister was accused by a Labour MP of being “less than straightforward”

after claims there were dozens of e-mails which had not been given to Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into the media.

There are also said to be unreleased e-mails between Mr Cameron and his former director of communications, Andy Coulson, from when the latter was still working for News International.

Downing Street sources stressed that the Leveson Inquiry had only requested the release of communications between Mr Cameron and Brooks that were “relevant”.

A No 10 spokesman said: “All the material the inquiry asked for was given to them.”

But Labour MP Chris Bryant said: “If the Prime Minister has taken any steps to prevent any material – relevant or

not, whether texts, e-mails or notes of conversations between David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and News International – from coming into the public domain, then people will think this is yet

another instance of the Prime Minister being less than straightforward with the country.”

A Downing Street spokeswoman said: “All the material that the inquiry asked for was provided. We have co-operated fully with the inquiry and we are now looking forward to that report.

“Nothing has been withheld with regard to the Leveson Inquiry. Everything the Leveson Inquiry requested we have provided.”

Any subsequent request for the release of further documents under Freedom of Information legislation would be dealt

with “on its merits”, said the spokeswoman.