User:Jeremywarneruk

Jeremy Warner is a British journalist based in London (UK) who specialises in economics, financial markets and business affairs. He is currently assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph, a London based broadsheet newspaper, and he is also the paper's chief economics commentator.

A serial winner of awards, he gained some notoriety in the late 1980s in a legal case involving defence of sources. The case revolved around a number of relatively trivial articles in The Times and The Independent in which Mr Warner reported the decisions of the competition authorities on whether to clear or block various takeover bids before these decisions were officially announced.

A Department of Trade and Industry investigation was ordered into whether the supposed wider dissemination of this prior knowledge of market sensitive announcements had been used for insider dealing in the stock market. New legislation had recently given the DTI wideranging powers to clamp down on malpractice in the City, including the power to compel the provision of evidence as if in the witness box of a court of law.

When Mr Warner refused to reveal the sources of his information - on the basis that to reveal sources would undermine freedom of the press - his case was taken to the High Court, which found against him. This judgement was overturned in the Court of Appeal, but later upheld in the House of Lords, then Britain's highest court. Recourse to the European Court of Human Rights was not at that time available to journalists, though in later similar cases the ECHR has generally backed the journalist's right to defend the anonymity of sources. At no stage was Mr Warner accused of insider dealing himself.

The case was then returned to the High Court for "punishment", where the then presiding Vice Chancellor, Sir Nicolas Browne-Wilkinson, stopped short of imposing a custodial sentence, and instead ordered a substantial fine for refusal to disclose sources, later paid by Mr Warner's then employer, The Independent. The British Guild of Newspaper Editors later awarded Mr Warner a special prize for an "outstanding contribution in defence of freedom of the media".