‘Fake Sheik’ Mazher Mahmood is found guilty in the former X Factor judge Tulisa Contostavlos sting case

UNDERCOVER Sun journalist Mazher Mahmood was convicted yesterday of conspiring to pervert justice.

Mahmood, 53, known as the Fake Sheik for his celebrity stings, was ruled to have tampered with evidence in the collapsed drugs trial of TV’s Tulisa Contostavlos.

The former X Factor judge, 28, had been accused of arranging the sale of £800 of cocaine to Mahmood, posing as an Indian film-maker at a London hotel in 2013.

But the case was thrown out in 2014 after a judge thought Mahmood lied about discussing evidence with his driver Alan Smith, 67, before the hearing.

Speaking outside the Old Bailey, Mahmood, of Purley, South London, said: “I’m gutted and shocked.” Smith, of Dereham, Norfolk, was convicted of the same charge as Mahmood. Both will be ­sentenced on October 21.

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Last night Dominic Ponsford, editor of the Press Gazette, said: “In the race to demonise Mahmood don’t forget that his ‘victims’ were invariably already rich people who offered to do bad and often illegal things.”