Franz Wild, Ed Siddons, Simon Lock, Jonathan Calvert, and George Arbuthnott report:
A multimillion-pound high court case between an authoritarian Gulf emirate and an Iranian-American businessman has revealed how hacked evidence is being used by leading law firms to advance their clients’ claims.
It includes allegations that a former Metropolitan Police officer hired Indian hackers and that lawyers from a top City firm held a secret “perjury school” in the Swiss Alps to prepare false witness testimonies about how they got hold of illegally obtained information.
Last week the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Sunday Times exposed the criminal activities of Aditya Jain, a 31-year-old computer security expert who set up a “hack-for-hire” operation from his apartment in Gurugram, India.
Read more at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, keeping in mind this statement from the piece:
A striking feature of the English legal system is that a judge will accept hacked emails as evidence in court unless persuaded to exclude it. Peter Ashford, a London solicitor and expert in the admissibility of illegal evidence, claims the English system is “the most liberal”. He added: “Even if you’ve done the hacking, you’ve still got a pretty good chance of getting it in [to the court].”