Reference to IT forensics, half way down………..
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E-mail discovery
At the heart of the collapse of the BA price-fixing trial was the discovery of 70,000 fresh e-mails.
In 2006, the OFT liaised with Herbert Smith, the law firm that was working for Virgin Atlantic, to devise an IT process for the inspection of e-mail records.
This material ran to hundreds of thousands of e-mail records, involving e-mails from seven Virgin Atlantic employees.
The documents were filtered down by using a keyword search and one set of documents made available for 2005 was “largely incomplete”. At the time the OFT was informed that a number of files had been corrupted.
But last week it emerged that the corrupted files were capable of being restored and that some of the files were in effect containers for a large quantity of e-mails and attachments.
These included documents relating to Paul Moore, former director of corporate affairs at Virgin who was to have been a key prosecution witness.
The restored files consisted of 70,000 documents, which were later reduced to 12,000 e-mails made or received by Mr Moore between the start of 2004 and the end of his employment in 2006.
The prosecution’s case was undermined by the fact one of the e-mails showed the decision to lift fuel surcharges was made at Virgin before anyone at BA was spoken to.