Perot contests email archive trawl in £2m defamation case

Perot Systems Europe and UBS are contesting a request by an IT manager suing his former employers for £2m over an alleged defamatory job reference to provide copies of email records dating back to 1999 at the forthcoming trial.

Michael Johnson, who had worked for outsourcer Perot Systems Europe, claims an employee of the company provided defamatory information to an employee-screening service for a job reference that subsequently cost him his position at Deutsche Bank.

The email records in question relate to Johnson's time as a contractor for Perot on the UBS Warburg contract between December 1998 and August 1999.

In 2002 Johnson made a request for the emails through the UK's data protection watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office. At the time UBS argued the cost of retrieving the emails was "disproportionate" without specific evidence to help locate the appropriate messages, and so the ICO took no further action.

Johnson then issued a witness summons for the jury trial requesting copies of all emails from 1 July 1999 onwards concerning "Michael Leo Johnson" issued on or on behalf of Perot Systems and/or UBS.

But UBS is contesting the request and a witness statement from Joanne Barbara Smithsons, head of global messaging services for Perot on the UBS contract, claimed the cost of retrieving the emails would be £4.27m for searching 70 servers and 61 backup dates.

"Complying with the Witness Summons would theoretically require the restore of every server for every backup data over the last five years in order to capture emails sent by any employee of UBS or Perot Systems since 1 July 1999," she said in the document. "However, there is no guarantee that any email which may have referred to the claimant would still exist as explained."

She said the OpenMail infrastructure used back in 1999 has been decommissioned and that UBS Investment Bank now uses a company in the US to carry out restores from backup tapes, rather than in-house facilities.

In the meantime the court has ordered that the witness summons be put on hold pending any further evidence before the trial from Johnson in support of the order, after which a futher hearing may be held. But in a ruling on 3 June, the judge said "it must be highly improbable that leave ought ever to have been given to issue the summonses". Johnson is now appealing the ruling by Master Eyres.

Both Perot Systems Europe and Michael Johnson declined to comment.