News Of The World asked HCL to delete staff e-mails 11 times

NEW DELHI: India's fourth largest IT company, HCL Technologies, has told a UK House committee that 11 requests for deletion of staff e-mails came from News International, during a 19-month period.

The company wrote to the House Affairs Select Committee chairman Keith Vaz, saying it had received requests from the client, as recent as December last year.

At many instances HCL replied in negative to requests of News International to manage its e-mail system. The first instance of request for e-mail deletion of old employees, who had left the News Of The World (NOTW), came in April 2010. The second instance was in the same month for deletion of 200,000 delivery failure messages. In both these instances HCL did not initiate any action.

At another instance 20,000 messages were deleted as they were not letting a mailbox function. In January, NOTW asked HCL whether it possessed a capability to truncate a database, and HCL replied in negative. Keith Vaz, whose parents hail from India, said that the request for deletion of folders and e-mails by News International is 'concerning'.

"The committee will continue to investigate the issue of phone hacking and the removal of any information that could possibly point to the prevalence of phone hacking by those working in the organisation," Vaz was quoted in a report by the Guardian.