The High Court last week heard witness evidence about “wiped laptops” and went into forensic detail of the revision history of minutes files held by IQ EQ, a Jersey-based company that holds Barne Estate in trust.

The witnesses included Mr Rhys Evans, a forensic computer scientist who has worked for police forces in criminal prosecution, and Conor Gavin, a Dublin-based digital forensic specialist who has previously worked on Government tribunals of inquiry, including the Banking Inquiry.

The court heard that there were six “revisions” of a minutes document between 30 August 2023 and 12 December 2023, and both witnesses were asked to explain in detail what the revision counts could mean.

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Rhys Evans confirmed that each fresh saving of a document would result in the overwrite of the earlier version, and he also agreed that there was no extraneous evidence, besides the revision count, to suggest that another version of the minutes existed. Conor Gavin described the revision count as “essentially a count of the number of saves that have been made to a document.

“So, every time a user makes an edit to a document and hits save the revision count goes up by one. It’s as simple as that.”

“You can infer, perhaps, things from it, but it is simply just a count of the number of changes saved to a document in its most simple form,” he said.

Wiped laptops

Under cross-examination by Mr Paul Brady, acting for the Magnier family, Mr Gavin confirmed to the court that six laptops, belonging to four different IQ EQ custodians, were “subjected to a standard wiping of the device”.

The four custodians were named as Ben Newman, Claire Mansell, Kieran Mitchell and Sarah Pritchard, who the court heard were all involved in the minutes.

Rhys Evans was asked by senior counsel Niall Buckley, acting for the Barne side, if organisations commonly wiped or formatted the devices of former employees is a common phenomenon in organisations. He replied: “It can be.”

He said he had encountered organisations where it happened and others where it did not.

John Magnier and his children JP Magnier and Katherine Wachman allege that Richard Thomson-Moore, Barne Estate Ltd and two Jersey-registered companies broke a binding deal to sell the 751ac estate to him for €15m in August 2023 and broke an exclusivity agreement by agreeing to sell the estate to construction magnate Maurice Regan for €22.25m.

Costs

Both the Magnier and Thomson-Moore sides of the controversial Barne Estate case have previously highlighted the rate at which costs were escalating.

The cost of examining documents exceeded €1m for the Barne defendants, while the Magnier family’s senior counsel told the court that the cost of discovery would be “immense”.

An eight-week search of documents in Jersey resulted in 17.7m documents.