by Roy Greenslade, former Guardian media commentator and Professor of Journalism

When Mazher Mahmood was imprisoned nine years ago for conspiring to pervert the cause of justice it marked the end of his perfidious career.

But the lies exposed at his trial were only the tip of the iceberg. He had been guilty of lying throughout his years as a reporter with the News of the World and the Sun on Sunday.

Indeed, prior to his work for those newspapers, his controversial departure from the Sunday Times was also due to his dishonesty.

Now, after exhaustive research across several years, Paddy French and I have written a book which details a catalogue of Mahmood’s deceptions and deceit.

In Rogue: The Rise and Fall of ‘Fake Sheikh’ Mazher Mahmood we show how he lied in court several times over before he was eventually found out in the Tulisa Contostavlos trial in 2014.

We chart at least twelve instances where criminal prosecutions, involving 20 individuals, collapsed after Mahmood gave suspect evidence. All demand investigation by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

We point to eight examples of judges – two justices of appeal, five crown court judges and a stipendiary magistrate – being critical of Mahmood’s so-called journalism.

Yet, time after time, judges refused to accept evidence of prior cases which called into question Mahmood’s honesty and character. As a result, several people went to jail, or spent months in prison on remand. Many lost their reputations and livelihoods.

We expose a litany of lies told by Mahmood. Among the most obvious was his false claim to have been responsible for 250 people being convicted. Even lawyers hired by his bosses could find only 94, and many of those are yet to be proved. 

He lied to Lord Justice Leveson over the reason he left the Sunday Times in 1988. He lied at the Leveson Inquiry by stating that he was unaware of phone-hacking by News of the World colleagues. He further lied at the inquiry by denying that he used private investigators who were involved in illegal information gathering.

Yet, as early as 1994, just three years after joining the News of the World, both Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service knew of his propensity to lie.

During the discovery process in the phone hacking litigation a revelatory set of documents from News Group Newspapers’ archive were disclosed. These detailed how a trial based on one of Mahmood’s stories collapsed after he lied in the witness box.

At that point, a covert Metropolitan Police report referred to Mahmood in “an unfavourable context”. However, he went on working hand in glove with the Met for years afterwards. 

Moreover, in spite of police disquiet and in spite of any number of controversies involving seedy “sting” operations such as the prosecutions of actor John Alford and the Earl of Hardwicke, the false Victoria Beckham kidnap plot, and the collapsed red mercury trial, Mahmood received staunch support from News of the World editors and managers at Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

Murdoch was well aware of Mahmood’s work, writing to a member of the House of Lords to praise the reporter’s “great style” as an investigative journalist.

We view the Mahmood story as a key component to the overall phone-hacking scandal in which, to quote former prime minister Gordon Brown, Murdoch’s publishing company was exposed as part of a “criminal-media nexus”.

Brown, building on the revelations by The Guardian’s Nick Davies, was outraged by the routine use by News of the World journalists of the so-called “dark arts”.

Even within that cohort of villainy, Mahmood stands out for his employment of utterly contemptible methods. He set out to fool people into committing crimes they would not have thought to carry out without his offering them disproportionate inducements to do so.

He routinely engaged in subterfuge and sometimes used agents provocateurs. He recruited a “gang” of accomplices, at least six of whom had criminal records.

As we ask in our book: how and why did Mahmood get away with it for so long? Paddy and I see the book as a vindication of our prolonged campaign to highlight his misdeeds, and as a forensic reckoning on behalf of his victims.

After reading the manuscript, Nick Davies, commented: “Roy Greenslade was there before the rest of us, spotting the cynical dishonesty of Mazher Mahmood. 

“Now he and Paddy French have gone further in pulling together the whole sordid story of this liar with a press card who was happy to ruin lives and who was handsomely rewarded by the ruthless corporation which made money out of him.”

Despite its obvious significance we’ve not been able to persuade any mainstream British company to publish the book. So, we’ve had to do it ourselves and, to help raise the necessary funds, I launched a crowd-funder.

Paddy has also written at length about the book on the Press Gang website: https://paddyfrench.substack.com/p/exclusive-rupert-murdochs-fake-sheik?r=o41j8