Jay Solomon, former staff of Wall Street Journal (WSJ), has accused a U.S. law firm of hacking his email and leaking confidential information that led to his dismissal and ruined his journalistic career.

Mr Solomon, former chief foreign correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, filed a lawsuit on Friday, asserting Dechert LLP, based in Philadelphia, U.S., hired some hackers based in India to access his email and steal sensitive correspondence sent by his source, Farhad Azima, who is an Iranian American aviation executive.

Some of the leaked correspondence contained information about Messrs Joseph and Azima mulling the idea of a business partnership.

The dismissed reporter alleged the U.S. law firm Dechert LLP “wrongfully disclosed this dossier first to Solomon’s employer, The Wall Street Journal, at its Washington, D.C., bureau, and then to other media outlets in an attempt to malign and discredit him.”

The leaked emails “effectively caused Mr. Solomon to be blackballed by the journalistic and publishing community.”

The former WSJ reporter’s source, Mr Azima, further asserted that Dechert LLP colluded with BellTroX, CyberRoot, and a number of private investigators to hack the emails and leak their contents to the public.

According to Reuters, Messrs Joseph and Azima claimed the U.S. law firm hired the hackers to favour their client, Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi, ruler of the Middle Eastern emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, to win a fraud trial instituted against Mr Azima in London in 2016.

An Associated Press report in June 2017 disclosed aviation tycoon Mr Azima offered Mr Solomon a minority ownership in a business he was forming.

In his defence, the dismissed reporter said he didn’t immediately reject Mr Azima’s business offers as a sign of respect to the aviation tycoon who had been tremendously helpful to his reporting on the Middle East. 

He, however, insisted that he had no plans to accept the offer or use their connection for personal gain.

He gave his account of the scandal in the Columbia Journalism Review published in 2018.

Although he admitted that staying on the business mogul’s yacht was among his “serious mistakes in managing my source relationship with Azima.”

Mr Solomon expressed concern over the hack-and-leak sting operation, describing it as “a trend that’s becoming a great threat to journalism and media, as digital surveillance and hacking technologies become more sophisticated and pervasive. This is a major threat to the freedom of the press.”