[ by Melanie Gretchen ] Victims of wire tapping by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. have submitted evidence to prove the company "sought to conceal the extent of its wrongdoing by making false statements and destroying e-mails and computers.  Claims by people whose voice mails were being intercepted by the company's now-defunct News of the World tabloid are participating in civil lawsuits against the unit of News Corp., a situation made public last month by a High Court Judge. lleged Coverup. Quoting extensively from company e-mails, the filings address whether senior employees attempted to cover up wrongdoing at the News of the World.  Many of the allegations pertain to an "Email Deletion Policy" that the filings claims was set in motion by News International (NI), News Corp.'s U.K. newspaper unit, set in motion in 2009 and continued into 2011:

In November 2009, a draft framework of the policy, quoted in the filing, describes this aim: "To eliminate in a consistent manner across NI (subject to compliance with legal and regulatory requirements) emails that could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation in which an NI company is a defendant.  [CI Note: Did News International already anticipate that it would be sued?]

Going forward, the company has agreed to assess damages on the presmptions that such actions occurred, without admitting or denying them.  To date, News Corp. hasn't contested the allegations in court. Alleged History of Incidents. In the filings, lawyers for phone-hacking victims said that News International had a legal obligation to preserve information, starting in at least 2007, when the company first received civil lawsuits related to the hacking.  Incidents include:

• In late 2010, the company destroyed computers used by News of the World journalists, some of whom allegedly had links to phone hacking, the filings say.
• In July 2011, a senior executive "caused and procured an employee to remove 7 boxes of [his or her] own records from the company storage facility, the filings say, without describing what happened to the boxes after their removal.

Company Policy. A year and a half after the "email deletion policy" was conceived in 2009, a senior executive pushed for its integration.  "How come we still haven't done the email deletion policy discussed and approved 6 months ago?" the executive asked in an e-mail, according to the filing.  Shortly after, in September 2010, an IT employee sent an e-mail, saying, "There is a senior NI management requirement to delete this data as quickly as possible but it needs [sic] to be done within commercial boundaries." That month, the News Corp. unit deleted all e-mails in the archive system up to September 2004.  In January 2011, it deleted all e-mails up to September 2007, the filing says, though police recently recovered them. For further details, go to [WSJ, 2/25/12].