Head of news Chris Pharo and reporter Jamie Pyatt found not guilty of aiding and abetting police officer to commit misconduct in public office

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

The last Sun journalists to be prosecuted under the controversial £30m Operation Elveden investigation into cash for stories have been cleared.

The Metropolitan police faced immediate criticism from the reporters’ barristers who described the pursuit of the paper’s head of news, Chris Pharo, and its Thames Valley district reporter, Jamie Pyatt, as a “monumental error”.

After 12 hours of deliberations, the jury found them not guilty of aiding and abetting a Surrey police officer to commit misconduct in a public office between 2002 and 2011.

It was the second time Pharo and Pyatt had been tried for the offence, although the indictment was slightly changed after the first jury in Kingston crown court failed to reach a verdict at the start of the year.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jamie Pyatt. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA

Out of the 29 cases against journalists, only one, the Sun crime reporter Anthony France, has been convicted by a jury. He is appealing against the conviction. A second journalist, Dan Evans, who worked at the News of the World and the Sunday Mirror, pleaded guilty to an Elveden offence.

Outside court, Pharo said: “It’s the end of a four-year-long nightmare for Jamie and I but it’s extended way beyond just us.

“It’s damaged our families, our friends and the true human cost to everybody caught up in Operation Elveden is incalculable.

“I want to ask one simple question: how could anyone imagine spending more than £30m over four years prosecuting journalists for doing their job was remotely in the public interest?”

Thursday’s verdicts bring to a close a string of trials of tabloid journalists, the majority of whom worked for the Sun or the now defunct News of the World.

The verdict was greeted by cheers from supporters and colleagues.

Pyatt’s lawyer Nigel Rumfitt QC told the court there had been a “monumental error of judgment in pursuing the case”.

The defendants’ confidential dealings with public officials came to light in the wake of News International’s decision to hand over emails to police after it became embroiled in the 2011 phone-hacking scandal.

At the time, management described its co-operation with the police as “draining the swamp”, a phrase that infuriated journalists. But it believed it would hasten the end of the company’s troubles with UK police.



However it served to deepen divisions between the company’s management standards committee and Sun journalists including some of its most senior editors, many whom found themselves facing criminal charges.

During Pharo’s trial his lawyer branded the company a “copper’s nark” while another journalist unsuccessfully sought to have his trial thrown out on the grounds that News International, now News UK, had breached journalists’ right to keep sources confidential.

The News International paper trail showed that a Surrey police officer, Simon Quinn (referred to in court as 2044), had received £10,000 for tips on high-profile criminal investigations, including those into the murder of schoolgirl Milly Dowler, “trophy rapist” Tony Imiela and quadruple killer Daniel Gonzalez.



But Pharo and Pyatt denied actively encouraging the officer to breach his professional duty.

Pyatt insisted the information he had received was all in the “public interest” and there was “nothing in there so confidential and secret the public don’t have a right to read it”.

The reporter said he had been “given” the police officer as a contact by the Sun news desk and everything he did had been “sanctioned” by the newspaper.

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.

During the trial he complained that his former boss Rebekah Brooks was “back in her job” as chief executive while he was answering questions about thestories in court.

He described Brooks’s fits of rage with staff and how she had put them under increased pressure to produce exclusives as rivalry between the paper and the News of the World intensified over scoops that, it is now known, the NotW obtained through phone-hacking.

He told jurors that Brooks had a punchbag in her office to “relieve tension”, she would “explode” in editorial meetings and could “sulk for days” over missed stories.

Recalling one incident, he said: “There was a story, an exclusive, they had which we now know came from phone hacking. This was the David Blunkett story. He was having an affair with a married woman.

“That information was hacked from Rebekah’s own phone from the NotW. He was leaving messages on her own voicemail asking her how to deal with the situation. It’s a matter of public record the NotW was hacking her phone.

“The following morning, at 11am we all received a text message and it said something along the lines of ‘yet again I have to pick up this morning’s NotW and it contains another agenda setting story’.

“‘If you fucking cunts are not capable of matching them, I will sack the lot of you and replace you with them.’”

Brooks was cleared of all wrongdoing following a trial last year

Pharo and Pyatt became the last journalists to stand trial for paying public officials after a review by the director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, in April.

Saunders dropped nine out of 12 outstanding cases after the former News of the World crime reporter Lucy Panton successfully appealed against her conviction.