Mirror Group Newspapers

Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) is the publisher of the national titles the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and The People. Robert Maxwell acquired the group in 1984 and floated it in 1991.¹ Since 1999 its parent company has been the company incorporated in 1904 as the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo and now named Reach plc.²

Corporate Entities

The Companies House register carries three companies with the group's name. Company 00168660 was incorporated on June 29, 1920 and was named Mirror Group Newspapers plc until April 21, 1994, Mirror Group Limited from that date until September 25, 2007, and since then Stradbrook Holdings Limited, described as a non-trading company. Company 02542560 was incorporated on September 24, 1990 as Adviser (160) Limited and has been named Mirror Group Newspapers Limited since April 21, 1994; a members' voluntary liquidation began on June 18, 2025, with two BDO practitioners appointed, and dissolution is due on November 3, 2026. Company 02571173, incorporated on January 2, 1991 as Legibus 1606 Limited and renamed MGN Limited on April 16, 1991, is the active publishing company at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf.³

The parent company's register entry records the names The Liverpool Daily Post and Echo Public Limited Company (from February 15, 1982), Trinity International Holdings Public Limited Company (from January 11, 1985), Trinity Public Limited Company (from May 5, 1998), Trinity Mirror plc (from September 6, 1999) and Reach plc (from May 3, 2018).²

Maxwell Ownership and the 1991 Flotation

Maxwell bought the group in 1984. In 1990 Coopers & Lybrand Deloitte audited his main companies, and Maxwell attempted to disguise the financial collapse of the empire with secret loans from the Mirror Group pension fund. The group was floated in 1991, and receivers were appointed to Maxwell's personal estate the same year.¹

The MGN board approved Maxwell's request for sole signatory authority, for unlimited amounts, over all company bank accounts at a board meeting called at midnight and held at 2.45am on the day he took over; the board of Maxwell Communication Corporation had agreed to the same request in 1981. From 1984 a central treasury, based from 1987 in Maxwell House, handled treasury functions for all of Maxwell's companies including MGN, and the MGN finance department's role was confined to collating bank balances and processing cheques.⁴

Samuel Montagu was the merchant bank sponsoring the flotation.⁴ Lawrence Guest, finance director of MGN since 1977, sat on the pension fund investment committee, and Michael Stoney, whom Kevin Maxwell had wanted as senior finance director in November 1990, was from May 1991 answerable to Maxwell and responsible for bank relations, the treasury function and relations with the auditors. Alan Clements, who had retired as finance director of ICI, was approached in March 1991 to join the board as a non-executive director. Robert Bunn was finance director of the private-side Maxwell companies and a director of MGN, and Alan Stephens was company secretary of MGN from 1984; Stephens had been named company secretary of Robert Maxwell and Company in 1965, a company deeply entangled in the affairs of Pergamon Press, on which a 1973 Department of Trade and Industry report had said that Maxwell could not be trusted to exercise "proper stewardship" of a publicly quoted company.⁵⁶ Stephens was also a director of Bishopsgate Investment Management; Peter Walker had insisted that the secretarial function be split between MGN and Maxwell Communication Corporation, and Walker, displeased that board documents were often handed to directors half an hour before meetings, declined the chairmanship before the split was implemented.⁵

Pension Fund Transactions

In February 1986 the MGN pension fund bought Strand House, next to the Mirror Building, for 17.1 million pounds. The building was leased to Pergamon Press, which bought it outright for 17.8 million pounds nine months later. Six months after the pension fund purchase, Savills valued it at 36 million pounds when it was offered as collateral for a loan of 105 million pounds. Guest was on the investment committee that approved the purchase, and there was no independent valuation.⁷

Shares in Reuters were sold by MGN to the pension fund and bought back some time later at an artificially low price on backdated documentation; Guest signed the agreement unwinding the transaction.⁷ Coopers audit staff recorded in a memorandum of matters for partners' attention that paired transactions before and after the balance sheet date removed and then reinstated an MGN liability to the pension fund, with the note: "We understand from Robert Bunn that the reasoning is 'political.'"⁸ A letter drafted by Coopers & Lybrand Deloitte in June 1991 and addressed to Bunn warned that accounting systems, management information and statutory accounts were "well below the levels we would consider adequate", and described the quality of audit information as "lamentably poor." The inspectors found that Bunn, with Kevin Maxwell, bore "the major responsibility" for deficiencies in the information provided to the auditors and "a significant responsibility" for purchases of Mirror Group shares by Maxwell in breach of undertakings in the flotation prospectus.⁸

The Pension Funds in Parliament

On December 12, 1991, in a Commons debate on pension funds, Kenneth Hind described the appropriation by Maxwell of between 300 million and 500 million pounds from the Daily Mirror and Maxwell Communication Corporation pension fund as the catalyst for the debate. He stated that Bishopsgate Investment Management was wholly owned by the Maxwell family and that Maxwell and his two sons were trustees of the fund. He also stated that Lord Williams of Elvel, the Labour deputy leader in the House of Lords and a director of MGN, had addressed the Lords on January 31 on corporate governance. During the debate a Member asked whether the Labour Party would disclose and return the money it had received from Maxwell, citing Early Day Motion 365.⁹

On June 8, 1992 the Secretary of State for Social Security, Peter Lilley, told the Commons that 35,000 people had pensions or were members of pension funds within the Maxwell group, and that about 15,000 of them were guaranteed their pensions by Mirror Group Newspapers.¹⁰ On June 9, 1992 the Commons debated the Maxwell pensioners. Ron Leighton told the House that a deputation of Daily Mirror staff led by Joe Lynch had told him that Maxwell was taking over the Daily Mirror only to get hold of the pension fund, which Lynch put at about 500 million pounds.¹¹

Seymour Hersh and Nicholas Davies

In October 1991 the Mirror Group published a series of prominent articles attacking Seymour Hersh and his British publisher Faber and Faber over Hersh's book The Samson Option, suggesting that the book made false allegations about Maxwell and Nicholas Davies, a former foreign editor of the Daily Mirror. On Thursday, August 18, 1994 the group apologised "unreservedly" in court for those articles, acknowledged that its attacks were "entirely improper," and agreed to pay Hersh and Faber "substantial damages" and their costs.¹² The allegations themselves, and the Commons motions and denials that followed publication, are set out on the Robert Maxwell and Nicholas Davies pages.

Inspectors, Regulators and Prosecutions

The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry appointed two inspectors in June 1992 under sections 432 and 442 of the Companies Act 1985 to investigate the affairs and membership of Mirror Group Newspapers plc: Sir John Thomas and Raymond Turner. The report was published on March 30, 2001, and the Department announced that it was taking legal advice on directors' disqualification proceedings and that regulators and professional bodies had already acted on many of the events described.¹³ Coopers & Lybrand Deloitte had agreed in 1999 to pay 67.6 million pounds to Maxwell creditors, and the Joint Disciplinary Scheme fined PricewaterhouseCoopers a record sum the same year for shortcomings in the 1990 audit.¹⁴

The inspectors found that Clements bore "the major responsibility" among the directors for failing to ensure that the board could control the management of the company and Maxwell himself, and that his presence and that of Sir Robert Clark on the board "was used to convey the impression that MGN was a properly run listed company subject to the control of the board and not RM, whereas this was not the case." They found that board papers had been handed out as meetings started in 1991, and that the directors had in consequence "inadvertently" given Maxwell sole signatory authority on a new bank account.⁸ Of Stoney they found that he co-authorised two dozen unusual transactions between MGN and Maxwell private companies.⁸

Stoney was charged with conspiracy to defraud and false accounting over a 50 million pound loan from Bankers Trust to MGN in October 1991; the case did not come to court after Kevin Maxwell's acquittal at an earlier trial, and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales expelled Stoney. Bunn was tried for conspiracy to defraud over a pension fund transaction that took place after Maxwell's death, fell ill during the trial, and the prosecution dropped its case.⁸ The trial of Kevin and Ian Maxwell collapsed in 1995.¹⁴

Phone Hacking Litigation

Mr Justice Mann gave judgment in Gulati v MGN Ltd on May 21, 2015, on the claims of eight trial claimants for whom David Sherborne appeared; MGN was represented by Matthew Nicklin QC. The defendant had admitted liability to Shobna Gulati and nine other claimants in September 2014 and had published a general public apology for phone hacking in February 2015.¹⁵ Mann J found that phone hacking and other unlawful information gathering had been used in an extensive and habitual way across all three national titles from 1999 to 2006, and in 2017 MGN admitted that the findings applied to all newspaper desks at all three titles.¹⁶ The awards to individual claimants included 260,250 pounds to one, 188,250 pounds to another and 157,250 pounds to a third; the judge described the awards as far more substantial than in any hitherto reported privacy case.¹⁷

The Duke of Sussex and others v MGN Limited (case HC-2000-000003) was tried before Mr Justice Fancourt over several weeks from May 10 to June 30, 2023, with judgment on December 15, 2023. The claimants were Prince Harry, Nikki Sanderson, Michael Turner and Fiona Wightman, and the claim was one of many in the fourth wave of what the court called the Mirror Newspapers Hacking Litigation.¹⁸ MGN contested the generic allegations, and Fancourt J found that unlawful information gathering had continued after August 2006 to some extent. Expenditure on private investigators over the period, calculated by the claimants at 9.7 million pounds and put by MGN at just under 9 million pounds, exceeded 1 million pounds in each year from 2003 to 2005; 118 of 129 articles relied on in Gulati and the managed claims pending with it were admitted or found to be the product of voicemail interception.¹⁹ The court awarded 140,600 pounds in total to the Duke of Sussex, with awards for fifteen of the thirty-three sample articles among its heads, and 31,650 pounds to Mr Turner, 67,500 pounds to Ms Sanderson and 22,750 pounds to Ms Wightman.²⁰

The judge recorded that, as counsel for MGN emphasised at the start of closing submissions, by June 2023 MGN had paid out about 105 million pounds in compensation and costs to about 600 claimants in the Mirror Newspapers Hacking Litigation.²¹ MGN spent more than 2 million pounds on one investigator group, TDI/ELI. Documents which should have been disclosed for the Gulati trial in 2015 were not disclosed.²² Piers Morgan was editor of the Daily Mirror from 1996 until he was sacked in May 2004. MGN did not call him as a witness; the judge recorded that he had stated publicly on several occasions that although he knew about phone hacking, he had never hacked a phone or instructed anyone to hack one, and a former Mirror journalist, Mr Hipwell, gave evidence that Morgan knew of and took the benefit of the practice, evidence the judge in Gulati had described as "convincing."²³

Board and Legal Department Knowledge, 2003 to 2013

The 2023 judgment named five individuals whose knowledge of unlawful activity at the three titles was in issue: Marcus Partington, in-house lawyer at The People from 1997 and at the Mirror from 2002, deputy group legal director of Trinity Mirror plc from April 2007 and group legal director from 2014 to 2021; Paul Vickers, company secretary and group legal director of MGN from December 1992, a main board director from 1994, and holder of the same positions at Trinity Mirror plc from 1999 to 2014; Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror plc from February 2003 to June 2012; Vijay Vaghela, group finance director from May 2003 to February 2019; and David Grigson, a director from January 2012 and chairman from May 29, 2012 to May 2018.²⁴

Fancourt J found that the board of Trinity Mirror plc was by the end of Bailey's tenure "dysfunctional," with substantial parts of the business handled informally and not reported to the board. He found that Vickers knew of voicemail interception at least by 2003 and that Bailey knew, or turned a blind eye, from early 2007 at the latest; that the legal department knew; and that there was a pretence that there was "no credible evidence" of the practice when the board had desisted from investigating. He found that Vaghela, the non-executive directors and the former chairmen Victor Blank and Ian Gibson did not know, that no board agenda or minutes produced in the proceedings addressed unlawful information gathering or voicemail interception, and that a questionnaire circulated by Vickers in 2011 produced 44 denials. The company was taken to have known what Bailey and Vickers knew, and the board as a whole did not decide to condone or conceal the activity.²⁵

The judge recorded that the Metropolitan Police Service provided proof of the activity on a large scale in December 2013, that admissions followed in September 2014, and that MGN then tried to avoid disclosure and did not disclose material documents it knew it had.²⁶

Reach

At the time of the December 2023 judgment Reach had made provisions of 45.4 million pounds for known claims, potential future claims and common costs.²⁷ On February 9, 2024 Prince Harry and the publisher settled the remaining parts of his claim, with an initial payment of 400,000 pounds and further "substantial" damages.²⁸