Airline, Law Firm on Hot Seat in Discovery Debacle & Collapse of Big Price-Fixing Trial
A well-known law firm is on the hot seat along with its client airline over a belatedly produced 2005 e-mail that reportedly undermined a high-profile criminal cartel trial against four present and former British Airways executives.
The four were exonerated today after the United Kingdom’s Office of Fair Trading said it had decided not to pursue the case and a judge ordered a Southwark Crown Court jury to acquit the defendants, reports the Financial Times (reg. req.).
Defense lawyers for the British Airways quartet were blistering in their analysis of the situation, which followed the production last week of tens of thousands of previously undisclosed e-mails and other documents from a Virgin Atlantic computer database.
The Office of Fair Trading “ruined the lives of these four men by mounting and then insisting on a ludicrous prosecution doomed to failure from the start,” said attorney Ben Emmerson, who represented Alan Burnett, the former chief of U.K. and Ireland sales for British Airways. The government’s decision to pursue the costly case to trial, he said, resulted from “incompetence on a monumental scale.”
Attorney Richard Latham, who represents the Office of Fair Trading, characterized comments by Emmerson as “gratuitous abuse,” reports the London Times.
Meanwhile, the sudden collapse of the case is a reversal of fortune for Virgin Atlantic, which has escaped penalty as a whistle-blower witness but is now likely to face renewed scrutiny, reports the Financial Times in a second article.
The Office of Fair Trading, which says it did nothing wrong, is “reviewing” the role played by Virgin and its advisers, which include the London-based Herbert Smith law firm. Herbert Smith says it “properly complied with its obligations” in the case, the article continues. And Virgin—which admittedly conspired with British Airways between 2004 and 2006 to fix fuel surcharges before stepping forward to cooperate with the Office of Fair Trading—says it did not withhold evidence.
A third Financial Times article details the discovery process concerning some 70,000 belatedly produced Virgin documents.
Potential action by the U.S. Department of Justice had been put on hold while it awaited the result of the trial, according to the Financial Times.
