A BRITISH-BASED freelance journalist who received a copy of the dossier at the centre of Denis O’Brien’s court action for conspiracy and defamation against Irish PR firm Red Flag has claimed his computer was hacked two weeks ago.
Mark Hollingsworth, an author and journalist, told The Sunday Times he got the dossier of material from Karl Brophy, chief executive of Red Flag, for his research on an article about whistleblowers.
O’Brien has said the dossier was on a USB stick sent to him anonymously nine days ago after private investigators had begun making inquiries on his behalf into an alleged conspiracy to spread defamatory material about him and his businesses. There is no suggestion of a link between the alleged hacking and O’Brien’s receipt of the USB flash drive.
O’Brien is seeking a court order to allow him to inspect Red Flag’s computers to establish the identity of the person who is paying Red Flag and driving the alleged conspiracy to compile and disseminate the dossier of material about him.
Michael Cush, O’Brien’s senior counsel, said the material was circulated with the intention of harming Digicel’s recent stock market flotation. The $1.8bn (€1.6bn) float was pulled 72 hours before its launch with O’Brien blaming poor market conditions.
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Hollingsworth said he was given access to the Red Flag dossier of press clippings, and other files on O’Brien, via an email link to an online Dropbox facility after asking Brophy for background material on the businessman. The freelancer said he had not done anything with the material and it appeared to mostly contain information already in the public domain. One file gave a concise summary of the Moriarty tribunal.
O’Brien’s lawyers have claimed the dossier contains “three memos rife with defamatory material” about him.
Hollingsworth said he was locked out of his computer on the evening of Friday, October 9, by third-party software. He needed the intervention of IT specialists to regain control of his computer and is considering reporting the incident to the police.
Hollingsworth’s previous work includes Londongrad, a book about Russian oligarchs living in London. He has been a regular freelance contributor to The Sunday Times, the Mail on Sunday and The Guardian for more than two decades.
He was not commissioned to write an article about O’Brien for The Sunday Times, but when he began his research into the billionaire last July he told people in Ireland variously that he was writing a book about whistleblowers, an article for The Sunday Times, or an article about Denis O’Brien for publication in The Sunday Times Magazine.
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A number of people he met over the past three months, including politicians, have raised concerns that Hollings-worth relied on the reputation of The Sunday Times to secure interviews with them about sources, including those who may have provided material on O’Brien’s relationship with IBRC — the former Anglo Irish Bank — and other matters.
On Friday, Anne-Marie McNally, the parliamentary assistant for Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy, met the superintendent of the Houses of the Oireachtas and the parliamentary legal adviser. Murphy’s Dail questions about O’Brien’s purchase of Siteserv and the way his loans were dealt with by IBRC led to the government setting up a commission of inquiry. O’Brien has repeatedly accused Murphy of presenting inaccurate information.
McNally, who is standing for the Social Democrats in the general election, said she met Oireachtas officials because she feared Hollingsworth had sought out some Oireachtas members “with the intention of trying to ascertain their sources”.
The author said he asked people about sources as he wanted to write about whistleblowers and their motivations. He said: “I am a freelance and independent journalist who has been contributing to The Sunday Times for the past 25 years. This is a matter of public record. I have written countless articles for them. At no stage did I say that I was commissioned by The Sunday Times.
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“I told Catherine Murphy and Anne-Marie McNally that I freelance for that newspaper and I would be proposing the story in the same way that I have done so to any newspaper since I first became a journalist 31 years ago. This is standard practice. I am sorry if Catherine Murphy misunderstood my approach.”
In a libel action in 1999 in London by Neil Hamilton, then a Conservative MP, against Mohamed al-Fayed, then owner of Harrods, evidence was given that Hollingsworth passed on privileged documents from the rubbish bin of Hamilton’s lawyers.
The documents were allegedly obtained by Benjamin Pell, known as Benji the Binman because he went through law firms’ dustbins for newsworthy documents to sell to the press.