PIO actress among phone-hack pay-out

London: popular Indian-origin television actress is among a string of UK celebrities who won pay-outs worth £1.2 million from the Mirror Group of newspapers which was charged with hacking phones of public figures. Shobna Gulati won 1,17,500 pounds in damages after a three-week hearing at London's High Court over the extent of phone hacking at the newspaper titles owned by the group.

Gulati, popular in Britain for her role as Sunita Alahan in the long-running TV soap 'Coronation Street', former England football star Paul Gascoigne and six others were awarded damages totalling 1.2 million pounds after Justice Mann said the victims had all suffered a “serious infringement of privacy” and the scale of hacking had been “very substantial”.

“People whose voicemails were hacked for so often and so long, had very significant parts of their private lives exposed, and then reported on, are entitled to significant compensation,” he said in his ruling. Anjlee Saigol, the solicitor who represented Gulati, said they were “extremely happy” with the decision.