The Duke of Sussex has settled the rest of his High Court phone hacking claim against a publisher and has won “substantial” damages.
Prince Harry had taken legal action against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) for alleged “extensive” phone hacking that had reportedly taken place over several years.
The duke claimed that the publisher had written articles based on unlawful information gathered through phone hacking and the illegal use of private investigators.
Mr Justice Fancourt ruled in December last year that phone hacking was “widespread” across MGN titles for a number of years.
Prince Harry was initially awarded £140,600 in damages for 15 articles.
His barrister David Sherborne said on Friday that MGN had now accepted an offer to settle the remainder of his claim.
This included a “substantial additional sum by way of damages and all the costs of his claim”.
The exact sum is unknown.
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After a seven-week trial last year, it was found that phone hacking was “habitual” from 1998 at the Daily Mirror until around 2011.
Mr Justice Fancourt said it was done “in a more controlled way” after August 2006.
The judge also found that 11 private investigators were used “very substantially” by journalists and editors in relation to unlawful information gathering.
The unlawful activity was judged to have been “concealed” from parliament, shareholders and the public, and even the board overseeing MGN.
It was therefore ruled last year that the Duke of Sussex was probably hacked “to a modest extent”.
Mr Justice Fancourt said last year: “All three newspapers, and other tabloids, were obsessed with stories about the royal family and about Prince Harry in particular, which doubtless reflected the apparent public appetite for information about his successes and failures, his career, and in particular his love life.
“So far as the duke personally was concerned, his phone was probably targeted on occasions when there was an important storyline that MGN journalists were chasing, such as the ups and downs of the duke’s relationship with (Chelsy) Davy.”
Mr Justice Fancourt also said that 15 of the 33 articles about Harry examined at trial “were the product of phone hacking of his mobile phone or the mobile phones of his associates, or the product of other unlawful information-gathering”.
It was made clear by the judge that the damages awarded to Harry after the trial were also to compensate him “fully for the distress that he suffered as a result of the unlawful activity directed at him and those close to him”.
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