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Richard Desmond can use a cache of documents wrongly given to his lawyers by the British game regulator, that the media tycoon pursues the national lottery contract, judged the high court.
Desmond Northern & Shell was authorized to rely on the court on internal presentations, emails, reporting projects and other documents which have been disclosed “inadvertently” by the lawyers of the British game commission in the law firm Hogan Lovells.
The documents have been accidentally provided to Northern & Shell, which offer without success for the Lottery contract at ten years And continues the game commission on what the company claims to be an unfair license process.
The prestigious contract to manage competition franchiseed by the state has been won in 2022 by AllwynAn international operator whose ultimate beneficial owner is the Czech billionaire Karel Komárek.
As part of a massive disclosure exercise before a trial later this yearHogan LOVELLS sent documents that the game committee did not intend to be released in Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, the law firm representing Northern & Shell.
More than 4,300 documents – of more than 3 million people were received – were inadvertently disclosed to the lawyers of Northern & Shell. In a letter to BCLP, Hogan Lovells said that it had “become obvious that there had been certain errors in the disclosure process of our client which led to the inadvertent disclosure of privileged material”.
It was not until January of this year that “the apparent magnitude of disclosure errors has become clear”, according to a tribunal judgment on Tuesday.
The game committee has agreed that many documents could be used in the dispute, but it was opposed to a smaller set of 128 documents.
The disputed documents have covered questions, in particular the evaluation of competing offers and financial and strategic planning to the game committee for potential disputes. They included internal meeting notes, information documents and communications with the British government department for culture, media and sport.
The legal test to know if Northern & Shell could use the documents in the dispute was whether he had been disclosed due to an “obvious error”.
More specifically, the judge was to assess whether it would have been obvious to a “reasonable lawyer” that the documents had been disclosed by mistake.
In a decision on Tuesday, judge Jefford refused authorization so that documents from several categories were used in disputes, as if they had been clearly marked as privileged, or where it should have been obvious that the documents contained privileged legal advice.
However, she authorized Northern & Shell to rely on the court on several of the documents. These include documents which “did not disclose the content of legal advice”, or when it was difficult to establish that a lawyer had written the content.
Hogan Lovells refused to comment.
The game committee said that it had “nothing more to add to the representations made during a hearing on disclosure.
Northern & Shell hopes that the court declares that the commission process was illegal and requests damages in the case.
