[denphone]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011...al-staff-named

The full scale of phone hacking at News International, Britain's largest and most powerful newspaper group, finally began to emerge on Monday when the Leveson inquiry into press standards heard that 28 of the company's staff are named in notes seized from a private investigator who specialised in the practice.

The suggestion that the identities of more than two dozen NI staff were scribbled in the margins of Mulcaire's notes is the clearest indication yet that journalists at the company engaged in the practice systematically.

Jay read out a list of damning new statistics that illustrate the scale of what he called the "thriving cottage industry" Mulcaire was running on behalf of his client. He revealed that Mulcaire received a total of 2,266 requests from News International journalists in the period covered by his paperwork, 2,142 of which were made by four employees. They have not been named to avoid jeopardising the police inquiry. The most prolific of them made 1,453 of those requests.

Mulcaire's 11,000 pages of notes mentioned 5,795 names, he confirmed, who could be potential phone-hacking victims. Scotland Yard also gave evidence to the inquiry, admitting in its opening statement that it had grown too close to the press.