The four largest mobile phone companies in Britain have all denied assertions by Scotland Yard's Assistant Commissioner John Yates that he had "ensured" that the companies had contacted every celebrity and politician whose voicemails were hacked by a private detective working for the Rupert Murdoch tabloid News of the World . After searching their records, Vodafone, O2 and Orange/T-Mobile maintained that contrary to Yates's testimony in Parliament last September, they were never asked by police to warn any possible victims. In a statement last week, Vodafone said, "We were not asked by the Met police to contact any customers but believed it was important that we inform as many as we could. As it was a live investigation, however, we were very limited in the information we could pass on to customers. We were only able to remind customers, where we believed it was appropriate, of the importance of voicemail security." Today's (Wednesday) London Independent quoted an unnamed spokesperson for Scotland Yard as saying that Yates has already acknowledged "that more should have been done to inform victims of phone hacking and it was reviewing its correspondence with phone companies."

15/06/2011