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Scotland Yard’s director of public affairs has defended his decision to hire a former deputy editor of the News of the World on a £1,000-a-day contract.

Dick Fedorcio denied rigging a tendering process when he took on Neil Wallis – who has since been arrested as part of the phone hacking investigation – as a Met consultant.

Fedorcio is currently being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission over the move but he told the Leveson inquiry that his deputy was on sick leave and he needed an immediate replacement.

The Wallis revelation – exposed after his arrest – has already contributed to the resignations of the Met commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, and the assistant commissioner, John Yates.

Wallis had only recently set up his own business when he made a bid for the contract alongside public relations firms Bell Pottinger and Hanover. Fedorcio admitt that he’d wanted Wallis in the first place, before realising that the rules made a tendering process mandatory. Wallis’s company bid 50 per cent less than the two larger firms for the Met contract.

Leveson asked if the whole process had been “set up to get a result”, but Fedorcio said “it was not”.

The inquiry heard that Wallis had assured the Met that he was not implicated in the hacking scandal. The force was dismissing the revelations coming out of The Guardian during Wallis’s two-day per-week employment.

NoW reporter filed report on Met computer

Fedorcio admitted allowing a News of the World journalist to write an article from his office computer, giving him “advance sight” her story. He said he had organised “end-of-the-week meetings” with the redtop to give the Met more time to react to issues they wouldn’t usually hear about until Saturday afternoons.

Crime reporter Lucy Panton was under pressure to file her story about former police commander Ali Dizaei’s “reception” into prison, so Fedorcio “offered to let her type the story”. Panton also forwarded the story using his email, in which she pointed out it “would not be helpful for people to know” about the situation.

Fedorcio also denied favouring News International journalists when hiring staff, after it emerged that 12 in his press office had previously worked for the publisher. He said he met with tabloids more often than broadsheets because of their interest in salacious stories and their need for “detail” about operations.

(Source: MediaGuardian)

Picture taken by Flickr user bac888, shared under the creative commons licence.

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