The brother of one of the principal whistleblowers in News Corp's phone-hacking scandal has testified that efforts by Rupert Murdoch's organization to discredit him led to his death. In a statement to the Leveson inquiry into press ethics in the U.K., Stuart Hoare, the brother of Sean Hoare, who went on the record in a New York Times Sunday magazine feature about the hacking, said that he had agreed to testify in order to fulfill "my promise to my younger brother to uphold his name and finally prove that everything that Sean said was the whole truth." Following the appearance of the Times 's article, News Corp accused Sean Hoare of being unstable and unreliable and rejected "absolutely" his claims about voicemail hacking being a widespread practice at News of the World , the Sunday tabloid where Hoare had worked as a journalist, which was eventually shut down as evidence grew that supported Hoare's claims. Stuart Hoare said that his brother had stopped drinking for a year after he was diagnosed with liver disease, but that after the attacks on his character by News Corp, he was no longer able to continue working as a journalist, a profession that "he lived for." After that, said Hoare, his brother "began drinking again as he became caught up in the phone-hacking scandal." He added that his brother's sole motivation for going public "was based on trying to put wrongs right. ... l know this to be the case because Sean and I regularly discussed this and there are emails in existence which support Sean's description. ... The reality was that phone-hacking was endemic within the News International group." In his testimony before the committee, Hoare related that News International journalists, after hacking into phones would pass the "phone number to someone and then get the exact position" of the phone. It was clear, he said, that the "someone" who provided the location information was a police officer.

19/12/2011