Mirror Group ordered to pay £1.2m to phone-hacking victims

The publisher of the Daily and Sunday Mirror has been ordered to pay £1.2m (€1.68m) in compensation to eight phone-hacking victims, including the actor Sadie Frost and the former footballer Paul Gascoigne.

Frost was awarded £260,250 (€364,900) in what is believed to be the single biggest privacy damages payout since the phone-hacking scandal broke in 2010.

Gascoigne is to receive £188,250 (€263,965) in compensation from Trinity Mirror after the former England footballer told the high court he was driven to alcoholism and severe paranoia when journalists snooped on his voicemails from 2000 to 2010.

The newspaper group, which also publishes the People, was accused at a high court trial in March of industrial-scale phone hacking that made the News of the World look "like a small cottage industry".

On Thursday, the judge, Mr Justice Mann, ordered what he described as "very substantial" payouts after considering the scale of intrusion suffered by the eight claimants.

The newspaper group had been sued by Gascoigne, Frost, the BBC executive Alan Yentob, Coronation Street actor Shobna Gulati, flight attendant Lauren Alcorn, TV producer Robert Ashworth and EastEnders actors Lucy Taggart and Shane Richie.

Trinity Mirror admitted at the start of the three-week trial that more than 100 articles about the eight claimants were the result of phone hacking. The civil case is the first of its kind to result in a high court trial.

A criminal investigation into voicemail interception at the three titles is running in parallel to the civil hearing.

Ashworth, a former Coronation Street producer who told the court that phone hacking had ruined his media career and his marriage to soap actor Tracy Shaw, was awarded £201,250 (€282,174) for the invasion of his privacy.

Taggart received a £157,250 (€220,751) payout, while Richie got £155,000 (€217593), Gulati got £117,500 (€164,949), Yentob was awarded £85,000 (€119,325) and Alcorn got £78,500 (€110,200).

The payouts dwarf those paid by News UK, the publisher of the now-defunct News of the World, to phone-hacking victims. In contrast to those payouts, the Trinity Mirror damages were decided by a high court judge after the victims refused to settle out of court.

Giving evidence during the trial, Frost described how the voicemail interception made her suspect close relatives and friends of selling stories about her to the press, to such an extent that she even made her mother sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Guardian Services