News International promises to restore deleted emails
By Ian Dunt Follow @IanDunt
News International has promised to work with the police to restore deleted emails after its IT firm admitted many of them had been deleted.
Indian IT company HCL Technologies wrote to the home affairs committee yesterday informing them that it had been asked to delete emails by News International nine times since April 2010.
Labour MP Chris Bryant previously urged the prime minister to step in to prevent News International deleting emails as it struggles to limit the damage of the phone-hacking scandal.
Lawyer Stuart Benson said the requests were "not unusual at all". One instance involved 200,000 delivery failure messages, for instance.
"My client is aware of nothing which appeared abnormal, untoward or inconsistent with its contractual role," he wrote to MPs.
"It is of course a matter entirely for News International, the police and your committee as to whether there was any other agenda or subtext when issues of deletion arose, and that is a matter on which my client cannot comment."
A spokesman for News International said: "Since January [we have] been actively working with the police on Operation Weeting with regards to email data and other computer information which may be relevant to their inquiry.
"NI keeps backups of its core systems and, in close cooperation with the Operation Weeting team, has been working to restore these backups."
