Two News of World’s journalists in hacking charge

TWO former News of the World journalists will be charged with conspiring to hack phones, more than a year after one of them was told he would face no further action.

Neil Wallis who is one of two former News of the World journalists who have been charged with conspiring to hack phones. Picture: PA

Ex-deputy editor Neil Wallis and former features editor at the tabloid Jules Stenson are both accused of conspiring to illegally listen to voicemails between January 2003 and January 2007.

They were both arrested as part of Operation Pinetree, a Scotland Yard investigation into allegations that News of the World features staff had obtained information in this way.

Wallis was previously arrested under the main phone hacking investigation, Operation Weeting, in a dawn raid in July 2011, and was told in February last year that he would face no further action due to lack of evidence.

Today’s charge is under Pinetree, a strand of the investigation specifically looking at the newspaper’s features department.

Gregor McGill from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said: “The CPS has authorised the Metropolitan Police to charge Jules Stenson, former features editor of the News of the World and to summons Neil Wallis, former deputy editor of the News of the World, with an offence of conspiracy to intercept communications in the course of their transmission, commonly known as ‘phone hacking’.

“These decisions were taken in accordance with the Code for Crown Prosecutors and the DPP’s guidelines on the public interest in cases affecting the media.

“We have decided there is sufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction and that a prosecution is in the public interest.”

Stenson and Wallis will both appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on August 21.

Six other journalists who were also held as part of the inquiry have already been told they will face no further action.

In February last year, Wallis’s solicitor said that the journalist, nicknamed “the wolf man”, had suffered “a terrible ordeal” by being left in limbo for nearly two years.

Wallis was employed by then-Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson as a PR consultant before his arrest in 2011, and Sir Paul was pushed to resign after the journalist was questioned by police.

The former News of the World deputy editor also had close contact with then assistant commissioner John Yates, who also resigned after criticism of his links to the newspaper and the decision not to reopen the inquiry into phone hacking.