Mirror group faces hacking claims The phone-hacking scandal convulsing the British media spread beyond Rupert Murdoch's empire on Monday after four individuals issued High Court claims against the publisher of The Daily Mirror and The People tabloid newspapers. One of the claimants in the case against Mirror Group Newspapers - the former England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson - has filed a claim alleging phone hacking at The Daily Mirror when Piers Morgan was editor. Mr Morgan has repeatedly denied any involvement in phone hacking. The three other claimants are Coronation Street actress Shobna Gulati; Abbie Gibson, a former nanny for the Beckham family; and Garry Flitcroft, the former captain of Blackburn Rovers football team. Their allegations relate to the Sunday Mirror and The People. The claims allege "breach of confidence and misuse of private information" relating to the "interception and/or misuse of mobile phone voicemail messages and/or the interception of telephone accounts." No particulars of the claims have been filed. Parent company Trinity Mirror, representing MGN, which has consistently said its journalists "work within the criminal law and the Press Complaints Commission code of conduct," said: "We have no comment, we are unaware action has been taken at the High Court." Mr Morgan's spokesman referred the Financial Times to Trinity Mirror for comment. The claims come weeks before Lord Justice Leveson is due to unveil his proposals for the regulation of the UK press. There is widespread expectation that he will recommend statutory regulation and offer a damning indictment of the ethics of the press. The claims filed will come as a blow to Trinity Mirror, which has a market capitalisation of £180m and has struggled amid falling newspaper circulation and weak advertising revenues. The strength or weakness of the claims remains to be seen. They relate to articles published many years ago. The fact that the cases are at an early stage means MGN is not yet expected to file any response in court. The claimants, represented by Mark Lewis at Taylor Hampton, have four months to serve claims on MGN. News International, publisher of the now-defunct News of the World, has faced many more claims but has weathered the fallout because of the financial clout of its parent News Corp. NI has paid out $224m in litigation and settlement fees in relation to phone hacking. MGN faces the prospect of court hearings where lawyers for the alleged victims apply for the disclosure of internal documents from the group in connection with their case. The publisher has said publicly that it did not carry out an investigation into any alleged illegal practices at its titles because there was no evidence its journalists had hacked any phones. Robert Jay, counsel to the Leveson inquiry, challenged Mr Morgan in December to admit that The Daily Mirror had been "near the top of the list . . . of the perpetrators" of Fleet Street's worst behaviour. The former editor of the tabloid newspaper replied at the time: "Not a single person has made any formal or legal complaint against the Daily Mirror for phone hacking."