eDiscovery doesn’t just happen in the United States
I recently ran across a few articles on U.K. developer CPC Group Ltd and Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Co, which is the real-estate investment arm of Qatar’s sovereign-wealth fund. The decision was that Qatari Diar wrongfully backed out of a deal to redevelop London’s landmark Chelsea Barracks site after the plan was opposed by Prince Charles, a judge ruled.
Internal emails from Qatari Diar discovered after the case showed that the emir of Qatar wanted the Chelsea Barracks plan to be cancelled as he wanted to prevent the scrapped to avoid having the Prince of Wales becoming upset about the design of the development.
Further internal emails showed up that didn’t affect the ruling and these emails also showed that Qatari Diar was considering to ignore prince’s opposition. The emails said that the Prince of Wales actually had failed to stop other developments that were controversial or he didn’t like.
However claims were there that Qatari Diar “deliberately destroyed” relevant e-mails while its law firm, Herbert Smith, failed to search a server in London which contained email that were deleted from one of the firms other servers in Doha. Claims were made that these emails actually showed that Qatari Diar’s witnesses lied during the trial.
More on the case can be found http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-25/cpc-group-wins-chelsea-barracks-trial-that-featured-prince-charles-e-mails.html
Tags: archive, attorney, Collection, Defendant, discovery, e-discovery, eDiscovery, electronic discovery, Email Archiving, judge, litigation hold, responsive, Spoliation
