British Lawmaker Seeks Inquiry into Murdoch Testimony

A British legislator who has been prominent in investigating the phone hacking scandal said on Friday he planned to ask the police to formally investigate assertions by two former News International executives who have publicly contradicted James Murdoch’s testimony to a parliamentary committee.

The two executives said on Thursday that they told Mr. Murdoch in 2008 of evidence suggesting that phone hacking at one of the company’s tabloid newspapers was more widespread. The former executives said they informed Mr. Murdoch at the time that he was authorizing an unusually large secret settlement of a lawsuit brought by a hacking victim.

Mr. Murdoch, who runs the News Corporation’s European and Asian operations, including News International, the British subsidiary, told the committee on Tuesday that he agreed to pay £725,000, which was then about $1.4 million, in the case because it made financial sense. He testified that he was not aware at the time of the evidence, which most likely would have become public had the case proceeded and undermined the company’s assertion that hacking was limited to “a lone rogue reporter.”

But Colin Myler, the former editor of the tabloid, The News of the World, and Tom Crone, the former News International legal manager, said Mr. Murdoch was “mistaken” in his testimony to the parliamentary panel. They said he knew when settling the lawsuit brought by a soccer union leader, Gordon Taylor, about a crucial piece of evidence that had been turned over to the company: an e-mail marked “for Neville” containing the transcript of a hacked cellphone message, apparently a reference to the paper’s chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck.

“In fact, we did inform him of the ‘for Neville’ e-mail which had been produced to us by Gordon Taylor’s lawyers,” Mr. Myler and Mr. Crone said in the statement released Thursday night. On Friday, Tom Watson, an opposition Labour lawmaker who is a member of the parliamentary committee, told the BBC that he would “formally” ask the police to investigate the executives’ assertions.

“This is the most significant moment of two years of investigation into phone hacking,” Mr. Watson said.

Referring to the executives’ account, he said on BBC television: “If their version of events is accurate, it doesn’t just mean that parliament has been misled, it means the police have another investigation on their hands.”

He added: “There is only going to be one person who is accurate. Either James Murdoch, who to be fair to him is standing by his version of events, or Colin Myler and Tom Crone.”

Separately Chris Bryant, another Labour legislator, who says his own phone was hacked, said he had written to non-executive directors of News Corporation urging that James Murdoch and his father Rupert be suspended from their roles in running the company.

He said the company had displayed a “complete failure to tackle the original criminality” while “the lackadaisical approach to such matters would suggest that there is no proper corporate governance within the company.”

The circumstances surrounding the settlement of the Taylor case are a focus of the parliamentary inquiry because they could shed light on whether there was an effort by News International to obscure the extent of the hacking. It was the first lawsuit brought by a hacking victim, and it came while the company, which owned the tabloid, was reeling from the 2007 guilty pleas of Clive Goodman, the paper’s royal reporter, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator, for hacking the phones of the royal household.

Mr. Myler and Mr. Crone’s statement seems to mark a round of finger-pointing, coming days after the testimony of Mr. Murdoch and his father, Rupert, the News Corporation chairman, who testified that he was not to blame for the hacking and was let down by people he trusted.