Email to James Murdoch telling him hacking was rife at NotW was deleted days before police launched investigation

James Murdoch has repeatedly denied he had any knowledge that phone hacking at the News of the World went beyond one ¿rogue¿ reporter

An email warning James Murdoch that phone-hacking was ‘rife’ at the News of the World was deleted from his inbox days before police started an investigation into the newspaper, it was revealed last night.

The News International chief was contacted in 2008 by the paper’s editor Colin Myler who forwarded a chain of emails suggesting that phone-hacking was not confined to a single reporter and warned ‘unfortunately it is as bad as we feared’.

Mr Murdoch has repeatedly denied he had any knowledge that phone hacking at the News of the World went beyond one ‘rogue’ reporter.

But yesterday it was revealed that lawyers for News International have admitted to MPs that the email was deleted from Mr Murdoch’s account by an IT worker on January 15, 2011 - eleven days before the Metropolitan Police launched Operation Weeting into accusations of phone hacking.

Mr Myler’s copy of the email, which was sent after the decision to settle a court case with footballers’ union chief Gordon Taylor, was also removed from the system in a ‘hardware failure’, the lawyers added.

The exchanges between News of the World executives and lawyers warn that Mr Taylor was determined to ‘demonstrate what happened to him was rife throughout the organisation’.

In the email dated Saturday, June 7, 2008, Mr Myler went on to ask for ‘five minutes’ with him the following Tuesday.

Mr Murdoch replies two minutes later saying: ‘No worries. I am in during the afternoon. If you want to talk before I’ll be home tonight after seven and most of the day tomorrow.’

The News International chief last month said he was ‘confident’ that he had not read the email chain.

In a letter to MPs, Mr Murdoch said he could not have read the email exchange in full because of the ‘timing of my response, just over two minutes after Mr Myler sent his email to me, and the fact that I typically received emails on my Blackberry on weekends.’

Former News Of The World editor Colin Myler, left, sent the email to Mr Murdoch after the decision to settle a court case with footballers' union chief Gordon Taylor, right, who he said was 'determined' to expose the newspaper



Details of the deletion of the email came in a letter from Linklaters, the law firm representing News International, to the Commons culture, media and sport select committee. which was published for the first time yesterday.

In the letter, John Turnbull of Linklaters said: ‘Mr Murdoch’s copy of the email was deleted from his mailbox by a member of News International’s IT department on Jan 15 2011 as part of [an] email stabilisation and modernisation programme.

‘Mr Myler’s copy of the email was lost from the email archive system in a hardware failure that occurred on Mar 18 2010. The email archive system was subject to many such incidents.’

In a separate letter to the committee, Mr Murdoch said: ‘I wish to confirm again that I was not aware of evidence of widespread wrongdoing and did not seek to conceal it.’

Last month, a High Court judge accused News International of a ‘cover-up’ of phone hacking evidence after it was claimed that the company had deleted emails.