Daily Mirror owners to compensate celebrity phone-hacking victims

London's High Court has ordered Mirror Group Newspapers to pay £1.2m in compensation to eight celebrities who were found victims of phone-hacking.

Celebrities awarded payments include actress Sadie Frost, former footballer Paul Gascoigne , the BBC executive Alan Yentob, Coronation Street actor Shobna Gulati, flight attendant Lauren Alcorn, TV producer Robert Ashworth and actors Lucy Taggart and Shane Richie.

Phone-hacking victims sued the newspaper group saying their lives 'torn apart' by decade of mistrust and paranoia.

Justice Mann while delivering the ruling on Thursday described it as “very substantial” payouts after considering the scale of intrusion suffered by the eight claimants.

‘’The phone hacking was part of a large-scale pattern of the unlawful obtaining of information” by journalists at the newspaper group”, the judge said.

The newspaper group 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”.

"I think a majority of the British press have been operating in a way to has been intrusive and invasive to the private sanctuary of the citizens. There are massive and widespread activities of phones’ tapping, intercepting people’s emails. This is absolutely hostile to the idea of a fair, just and equal democracy", Lee Jasper, London-based human rights activist told Press TV. 

Jasper said that the phone-hacking scandal puts a question mark on the credibility of British press. 

"The British presses are in the dock. It has not handled itself well on issues such immigration, it is missing home in a public about the real nature of the austerity crisis and it is engaged in covert operations to gather phone calls and emails of celebrities. That is leading to a besmirching of the good name of credible journalists", he said

Frost who won £260,000 is believed to be the single biggest privacy damage payout since the hacking scandal broke in 2010. She expressed joy over the outcome of the case, but said she would never know the full extent of intrusion into her life.

Gascoigne is to receive £188,250 in compensation after he told the court he was driven to alcoholism and severe paranoia when journalists snooped on his voicemails from 2000 to 2010.

Ashworth, who told the court that hacking had ruined his media career and his marriage Shaw, is awarded £201,250. Taggart received a £157,250 payout, while Richie got £155,000, Gulati got £117,500, Yentob was awarded £85,000 and Alcorn got £78,500.

Critics say the payouts won't repair the damages already made to the victims.

"I think the payouts will only make sense, if there is real determination to stop these unethical practices in journalism. The fact is although the government has insisted the press clean up itself by forming self-regulatory body, there is still a great deal of difference between the government demands and the press creation", Jasper concluded.

Trinity Mirror admitted at the start of the 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.

The newspaper group is considering an appeal, saying the basis used for calculating the level of damages was incorrect. Meanwhile, the company is now facing new phone-hacking damages claims from more than 100 high-profile figures.

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