Murdoch group settled Prince William phone-hacking claim for ‘very large’ sum, UK court told

Prince William agreed to settle a phone-hacking claim with a UK media group owned by Rupert Murdoch in 2020 for a “very large” sum, the High Court in London heard on Tuesday.

Details of the deal emerged in legal filings as News Group Newspapers, which publishes The Sun, applied to strike out phone-hacking claims by Prince Harry, the Prince of Wales’s brother, and actor Hugh Grant ahead of trial, arguing the lawsuits had been brought too late.

Lawyers for the Duke of Sussex told the High Court that he had wanted to bring a voicemail claim against NGN from 2012 but was made aware of an alleged “secret agreement” between the royal family as an institution and the group not to bring legal action until the conclusion of other High Court phone-hacking cases.

Prince Harry said the secret agreement was “precisely the reason why I didn’t bring a phone-hacking claim against NGN until 2019”.

David Sherborne, barrister for Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, said in written arguments that his client had “had to make public the details of this secret agreement, as well as the fact that his brother, HRH Prince William, has recently settled his claim against NGN behind the scenes, having had to hold off bringing a claim for years for the same reasons as the claimant”.

NGN argues that the case should be struck out without trial and that it is “unreal” for Grant and Prince Harry to claim that they did not know about phone hacking and so had ample time to issue a lawsuit within the six-year time limit.

It has claimed there was no such “secret agreement” with the royal family. NGN declined to comment on “any confidential settlement with Prince William”.

In a statement to the court, Lord Anthony Grabiner, independent chair of the management and standards committee of News Corp, the parent company of NGN, said he could “confirm with great confidence” that a “secret agreement . . . was never mentioned to [him], nor otherwise drawn to [his] attention”.

Sherborne’s disclosure comes just days after Murdoch’s US Fox News paid out $787.5mn to settle a libel suit brought by voting machines maker Dominion over claims the TV network broadcast false accusations of election fraud.

The channel on Monday axed its top-rated host Tucker Carlson, who was named in the Dominion case. Media analysts said the move suggested that Murdoch was seeking to prevent the lawsuit from growing to match the phone-hacking scandal in the UK.

NGN has previously rejected allegations of voicemail interception and “other unlawful information gathering” at The Sun, claiming those practices took place only at the now-defunct News of the World.

The paper was shut down in 2011 at the height of the phone-hacking scandal, after it emerged that it had hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. Since 2010, its publisher has spent more than $650mn on legal costs relating to phone hacking on the back of a series of out-of-court settlements with claimants.

As well as NGN, Prince Harry is suing Reach, which owns the Daily Mirror newspaper, over alleged voicemail interception and Associated Newspapers, which publishes the Daily Mail.

He and six other claimants, including singer Elton John, actor Liz Hurley and Baroness Doreen Lawrence, allege they were victims of “unlawful information-gathering activities” — a claim that the media group denies.