The law firm Hamlins released a statement on behalf of the trio along with David Furnish, Liz Hurley, Sadie Frost and Sir Simon Hughes, which quoted them as saying: “We are delighted with today’s decision which allows our claims over serious criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy by the Mail titles to proceed to trial.
“The High Court has dismissed ‘without difficulty’ the attempt by Associated Newspapers, publisher of The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and the Mail Online, to throw these cases out. Indeed, the judge found that each of our claims had a real prospect of showing there was concealment of unlawful acts by the Mail titles and that this could not have been discovered until recently. Our claims can now proceed to trial.
“As we have maintained since the outset, we bring our claims over the deplorable and illegal activities which took place over many years, including private investigators being hired to place secretly listening devices inside our cars and homes, the tapping of our phone calls, corrupt payments to police for inside information, and the illegal accessing of our medical information from hospitals and financial information from banks. We intend to uncover the truth at trial and hold those responsible at Associated Newspapers fully accountable,” the said.
Meanwhile, The Daily Mail publisher ANL termed the allegations as preposterous and said they would establish this in the court in due course.
As we have always made unequivocally clear, the lurid claims made by Prince Harry and others of phone-hacking, landline-tapping, burglary and sticky-window microphones are simply preposterous and we look forward to establishing this in court in due course,” they said in a statement.In his 95-page judgment, Mr. Justice Nicklin stated that each of the seven individuals in the ANL claim possesses a “real prospect” of showing that ANL deliberately concealed “relevant facts.” These concealed facts, if known, could have enabled them to initiate a legal claim against the publisher at an earlier stage.“Whilst it is common ground that the publication of any unlawful articles was not concealed, these were, on the claimants’ case, only the tip of the iceberg,” the judge added.
“What was deliberately hidden from the claimants – if they are correct in their allegations – were the underlying unlawful acts that are alleged to have been used to obtain information for subsequent publication.”
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