REUTERS

LONDON SENIOR London police staff linked to the News Corp phone hacking scandal showed poor judgment, took bad decisions and got too close to journalists working for Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, an independent watchdog said on Thursday.

While the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC)rejected allegations of corruption involving two of the top personnel at the Metropolitan Police (MPS), it was highly critical of their and senior colleagues’ media relationships.

t said despite a growing clamour over phone hacking centred on Murdoch’s News International, the British newspaper arm of his News Corp empire, senior people at the force appeared “to have been oblivious to the perception of conflict”.

“It is clear to me that the professional boundaries became blurred, imprudent decisions taken and poor judgment shown by senior police personnel,” IPCC Deputy Chairman Deborah Glass said in a statement.

The IPCC comments come after investigations into John Yates, the country’s former top counter-terrorism officer, and Dick Fedorcio, the MPS media chief, over their relationship with Neil Wallis, a former deputy editor at the News of the World, the Murdoch tabloid at the heart of the phone-hacking furore.

Murdoch closed the paper down last year, and several News International executives and journalists have since been arrested by detectives investigating these and other allegations that public officials including police were bribed in return for information.

Fedorcio resigned last month after the MPS decided he would face charges of gross misconduct over the decision to hire Wallis in a media consultancy role after he left the newspaper in 2009. Wallis has since been arrested by detectives investigating allegations of phone hacking.

Yates quit his job last July, a day after Britain’s top officer Paul Stephenson also stepped down, after it emerged he had forwarded the CV of Wallis’s daughter to the head of the MPS’s human resources department.

“You probably know that Neil has been a great friend (and occasional critic) of the Met in past years and has been a close adviser to Paul (Stephenson) on stuff/tactics,” Yates, now an adviser to the Bahrain government, said in an accompanying email.

The IPCC concluded that there was no evidence of corruption but ruled both men had breached internal policies.

The relationship between police and News International executives and staff has come under the microscope with critics saying a cosy relationship, which included special briefings and meals at top restaurants often arranged by Fedorcio, meant phone hacking allegations were not properly investigated.