by NOEL MURPHY
GEELONG mayor Darryn Lyons has received a confidential payout from Rupert Murdoch’s News group over the alleged phone hacking of his former Big Pictures paparazzi agency.
The out-of-court settlement comes as a new round of phone hacking allegations is set to go to court in a civil trial against the Mirror Group of Newspapers, publishers of the Mirror, Sunday Mirror and People mastheads.
Reports of “widespread and habitual” voicemail hacking emerged last week in a legal hearing ahead of the trial. More than 40 journalists are alleged to have used internal company phones to illegally access celebrity voicemails.
Cr Lyons told the Independent last July he had been a victim of the United Kingdom’s News Corp phone hacking scandal. This week, he said he was also pursuing legal action against MGN. Media reports in the UK suggest the trial will be closely watched by hundreds of potential claimants.
Cr Lyons is also assisting two ongoing investigations that he would not disclose but which are understood to be high-profile police operations Weeting and Pinetree.
One of the biggest players in the British media for two decades, when he headed the former Big Pictures celebrity photo agency, Cr Lyons was listed a decade ago in the BRW Young Rich list, valued at $65 million.
At the height of his celebrity photography operations, Cr Lyons was negotiating photo sales worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each with some of the world’s biggest mastheads. He attracted worldwide notoriety over photos of Britain’s Lady Diana as she lay dying in a Paris car crash in 1997.
Cr Lyons’ settlement with News follows published apologies to him by the group’s Australian siblings the Geelong Advertiser and the Herald Sun over reports of his financial circumstances.
