Simon Hughes takes Daily Mail’s owner to court

The Guardian reports:

The Daily Mail’s parent company is facing its first legal claim for phone hacking, after the former Liberal Democrat MP Sir Simon Hughes filed a case against the newspaper publisher.

Hughes is alleging that Associated Newspapers – the owner of the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and MailOnline – misused his private information. He is expected to claim that the newspaper publisher employed a private investigator who improperly accessed his voicemail messages.

This is the first time the publisher of the Daily Mail will face a legal claim based on allegations of voicemail interception. Widespread use of this tactic at other outlets led to the closure of the News of the World and has mired both Rupert Murdoch’s News UK and the Mirror in decades of expensive legal action.

The former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, who is expected to be made a Conservative member of the House of Lords imminently, told the Leveson inquiry in 2011 that voicemail interception never took place at his company.

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