Mrs Laird is being sued in London\u2019s High Court for \u00a3982,000 by her former employer for fraud and negligence for failing to disclose she was depressed when she applied for the job in 2002.<\/p>\n
After collapsing in courtroom 36 of the Royal Courts of Justice at the end of Tuesday\u2019s proceedings, Mrs Laird was again present with her husband Hugh.<\/p>\n
Her solicitor John Dagnall concentrated on the events leading up to Mrs Laird\u2019s suspension in June 2004.<\/p>\n
The court heard that Mrs Laird was convinced that her emails were being read and that some were being deleted without her knowledge.<\/p>\n
Fearing she was due to be suspended, she asked an officer to retrieve politically sensitive emails, who discovered a virus that gave access to her email account.<\/p>\n
Mr Dagnall read an email from Christine Laird which said: \u201cI was relieved to dis$I wasn\u2019t imagining it, that emails were missing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mrs Laird downloaded the contents of her hard drive to disc and sent it to Gloucestershire police for investigation, said Mr Dagnall.<\/p>\n
He quoted an email from a member of the council\u2019s IT department saying he had also been in contact with GCHQ about Mrs Laird\u2019s email.<\/p>\n
Mrs Laird denies she acted fraudulently and is not liable for the \u00a3982,000 the council is claiming against her.<\/p>\n
Mr Dagnall questioned borough council solicitor Sarah Farooqi about whether the invoices for legal advice in the matter were reasonable.<\/p>\n
She said: \u201cI have just added up all the invoices we have received. I haven\u2019t made an assessment as to whether the costs are reasonable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Dagnall suggested the council were guilty of \u2018double counting\u2019 as it is claiming in damages both Ms Farooqi\u2019s salary for her work in the dispute and also the fees charged for locum support to cover Miss Farooqi\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
Miss Farooqi said: \u201cThat\u2019s your opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n
The case continues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Christine Laird thought her emails were being spied on while she was managing director of Cheltenham Borough Council and asked Gloucestershire police and GCHQ to investigate, a court was told yesterday. Mrs Laird is being sued in London\u2019s High Court for \u00a3982,000 by her former employer for fraud and negligence for failing to disclose she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,1615],"tags":[62,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-5183","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-contributions","7":"category-uk-news","8":"tag-spying","9":"tag-uk-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}