HCL says it's not responsible for deleting News International e-mails

Indian IT major HCL Technologies today informed UK’s Home Affairs Committee that it was aware of the deletion of hundreds of thousands of e-mails at the request of Rupert Murdoch’s News International between April 2010 and July 2011, but said it was not responsible for the deletion.

In a letter to committee chairman Keith Vaz, the HCL revealed that it had been involved in nine separate episodes of e-mail deletion, but added that it was not responsible for e-mails on the News International system that are older than a couple of weeks.

HCL identified three sets of e-mail deletions in April 2010, including a deletion of a public folder of a live email system that “was owned by a user who no longer needed the emails”.

A further 200,000 e-mails stuck in an outbox were deleted in May 2010 to restore email functionality. In September 2010 a further pruning of historic emails occurred to help stabilise the email archival system, which had been having “frequent outages” since November 2009.

In January 2011 HCL was asked about its ability to truncate a particular database in the e-mail archival systems. HCL “answered in the negative”.

Finally, in July 2011 HCL helped delete e-mails from the live system as relocation errors had occurred during migration from one system to the other.