British Airways Trial over Price Fixing Collapses

The 1 current and 3 former British Airways executives on trial for price-fixing walked free on Monday after the first contested prosecution for the crime collapsed. Justice Owens ordered the jury to acquit the 4 after the Office of Fair Trading said that they decided to drop the prosecution due to their case being undermined by the discovery of new evidence, which was found only last week among tens of thousands of emails.

The collapse of the Office of Fair Trading’s high-profile case is a big setback for the watchdog. It also raises question as to their strategy for prosecuting executives for an offence that could put them in jail for as long as 5 years.

Ben Emmerson, the defense attorney for the former head of UK and Ireland sales for British Airways, Alan Burnett, said that the decision to try the 4 was incompetent on a monumental scale. He highlighted how much of the public’s money was wasted on the trial, and added that the Office of Fair Trading ruined the lives of the defendants by mounting and then insisting on a ridiculous prosecution that was doomed to fail from the beginning.

Last week, 70,000 new documents emerged from the computer database at Virgin Atlantic, who revealed conspiring price-fixing to authorities. Defense attorneys said that at least one of the emails suggested that Virgin decided on a key pricing fix before ever talking to the British Airways defendants.

The other 3 men that were acquitted included former commercial director and board member Martin George; former head of communications Iain Burns; and current sales and marketing director Andrew Crawley. This isn’t the first time that British Airways executives were taken to trial over price-fixing, as the airline paid a £121.5 million fine in 2007 for the same issue.