Murdoch's Sun pays MP damages for accessing stolen phone's data

MP Siobhain McDonagh gets 50,000 pound damages from the tabloid for accessing pvt info from her mobile

A Labour MP has accepted "very substantial" damages from The Sun newspaper after the tabloid admitted its employees accessed private information from her stolen mobile phone three years ago, London's High Court heard on Monday.

Siobhain McDonagh later said she was paid £50,000 damages by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp following revelations Sun reporters had been accessing text messages on her mobile phone taken from her car in southwest London in October 2010.

"I'm not terribly high profile, I love doing my constituency stuff, but I would never have thought that my phone was of interest to a national daily newspaper," the MP for Mitcham and Morden in southwest London told BBC radio.

Phone-hacking by journalists on Murdoch's now defunct News of the World first came to light in 2005, with the paper's royal correspondent jailed in 2007.

News International, Murdoch's British newspaper business, said for years that the scandal was limited to a rogue reporter but subsequently admitted it was far more widespread.

Dozens of staff from both the News of the World and the Sun have now been arrested in connection with the phone-hacking scandal or related inquiries, while allegations have since spread to the Mirror newspaper with four current or former editors arrested last week.

Hugh Tomlinson, who is representing hacking victims, told the high court on Monday there had been "substantial developments", referring to the arrest last month of six people as part of a second suspected phone-hacking conspiracy at the News of the World.

This could involve "potentially hundreds of victims", he said although he added it was not clear how many new claims there would be.

McDonagh's case came to light when police told her in June 2012 that they had "obtained evidence that The Sun newspaper had accessed her text messages from about October 2010 and therefore appeared to have accessed and/or acquired her mobile phone," her lawyer David Sherborne told the court.

Dinah Rose, the lawyer for News International, offered an unreserved apology and said it accepted that there had been "a serious misuse of her private information".