Jonathan Rees is a private investigator who worked for both The News of the World and The Mirror from 1995. Rees and his agency, Southern Investigations, collected information on public figures (allegedly including Tony Blair, Kate Middleton (when she was Prince William's girlfriend), the governor and deputy governor of The Bank of England)politicians and a number of celebrities, through illegal and criminal means including phone hacking, bugging houses and computer hacking.
Blackmail was also regularly used - Rees regularly extracted confidential information and access from senior police officers by threatening to reveal information about their own illegal and compromising activities.
Earlier this year, Rees was acquitted of the murder of his business partner Daniel Morgan, who was found with an axe in his head in a pub car park on March 10, 1987. The case against Rees collapsed after 18 months of legal argument, in the end because their was too much paperwork to consider - 750,000 pages.
However, Rees had previously served 4 years of a 7 year sentence for planting cocaine on a woman. Rees was working for the woman's ex-husband at the time and they were trying to ruin her reputation so that she would not get the children after the divorce.
After leaving prison in 2005, Rees was re-employed by the then News of the World editor, Andy Coulson. Andy Coulson himself was employed until recently as British Prime Minister David Cameron's director of communciations.
SOURCESGuardian newspaper
International Forum for Responsible Media
