The BBC believes it was mistakenly listed as using the private investigator convicted of Data Protection Act offences following the Operation Motorman investigation, after a newspaper made an inquiry about the corporation’s wine bill.

The BBC director of editorial policy, David Jordan, told MPs on the Commons home affairs select committee on Tuesday the evidence taken from private investigator Steve Whittamore’s offices during a police raid was not as robust as claimed by the Operation Motorman investigators working for the Information Commissioner‘s Office.

Jordan said the BBC was listed in Whittamore’s files for two inquiries in 2001. One related to a story the BBC was covering about a paedophile, but the other was an attempt by a newspaper to find out “what the BBC’s wine bill was”.

This was logged by Whittamore as “BBC wineblag”. It made a reference to upmarket wine shop Berry Brothers and ended up being classified by the ICO as a BBC inquiry.

“That seemed to be handled by Mr Whittamore on behalf of another media organisation,” Jordan said.

The incident was one of several attempts at the home affairs committee hearing on the media’s use of private investigators to highlight the unreliability of some of the information in Whittamore’s files, which formed the basis of the ICO’s what price privacy? report in 2006. This detailed the number of information requests made to Whittamore by newspapers, magazines and broadcasters.

The Daily Mail’s deputy editor, Jon Steafel, told the select committee his paper had seen some of the files last summer and they appeared to be “contradictory or inconsistent”.

The managing editor of the Sun, Richard Caseby, said they were “chaotic and confused” and had grossly over-exaggerated the number of inquiries by the Sunday Times.

Caseby also criticised the Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, claiming he had breached the privacy of the former head of the Food Standards Agency, Geoffrey Podger, during an investigation in 2000 into biotech company Monsanto.

He referred to a passage in Rusbridger’s witness statement to the Leveson inquiry, which stated: “In 2000, we commissioned a report about allegations of corrupt links between an international corporation and officials in Europe and Whitehall. We used a corporate security company run by two leading former SIS officials. They could not substantiate the allegations and no report appeared.”

Caseby claimed this Guardian investigation “went off the rails” and invaded Podger’s privacy. It was a “deep ocean industrial trawl”, he said.

The Sun’s managing editor was then interrupted by a committee member, the Labour MP David Winnick, who asked whether he had raised this point because of the Guardian’s coverage of the paper’s publisher News International. The Guardian also publishes the MediaGuardian website.

A spokesperson for Guardian News and Media said: “As Alan Rusbridger said in his evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, there was one occasion when the newspaper used a business intelligence firm to make inquiries into allegations of bribery by a very large international corporation whose activities were at the time causing widespread concern around the world. They proved unfounded and we published nothing.”

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