England football manager’s phone targeted over 4 years, phone-hacking trial hears

The News of the World repeatedly hacked into the voicemail of Sven-Goran Eriksson over a four-year period as it exposed his sex life and then set him up for a sting by its “fake sheikh” reporter, Mazher Mahmood, an Old Bailey central criminal court jury heard on Wednesday.

At the climax of the campaign, the court was told, the then England football manager announced that he would resign, and the newspaper prominently claimed the credit for his fall.

In 2004, Greg Miskiw, a news editor, tasked the specialist hacker Glenn Mulcaire to hack Eriksson, the prosecution said. This time, the notes that were shown to the jury included the home address and phone number of Faria Alam, a secretary at the Football Association.

The News of the World then published a sequence of stories exposing her relationship with Eriksson (Sven’s secret affair) and with a senior FA executive (I bedded Sven and his boss). The stories were among those which won the News of the World the award for Newspaper of the Year 2004-5, the court heard.

Two years later, Mulcaire returned to Eriksson’s phone, repeatedly calling into his number in January 2006, allegedly listening to his private messages. On January 22, the News of the World published a series of embarrassing comments which Eriksson had made to the paper’s undercover reporter Mahmood, under the headline This man is a crook.

Mulcaire’s phone records suggest that he continued to hack the England manager’s phone until Eriksson announced that he would resign, the prosecution told the jury.