INTERNAL REVIEWS SHOWS MISTAKES COLLAPSED BA PRICE FIXING CASE

An internal review of the Office of Fair Trading’s price-fixing case against four British Airways executives has found that weak investigation processes and flawed management oversight were to blame for the failure of the case. The case was brought by the OFT after Virgin Atlantic admitted that it had conspired with BA to fix passenger fuel surcharges between 2004 and 2006. The case collapsed when the defence successfully argued that one of the 70,000 Virgin e-mails submitted to the court contradicted part of the prosecution’s case. The review found that the OFT should have seized or copied those e-mails at