£260m Jubilee line farce

The case centred around the Jubilee Line extension

The full cost of the collapsed Jubilee Line extension saga is more than £260million, police believe.

The figure can be revealed today as an investigation begins into what went wrong. The fraud trial, the most expensive case in British legal history, was ended by Judge Anne Goddard QC at the Old Bailey last night after two years of deliberations which cost taxpayers £60million.

The fiasco brought calls for the Crown Prosecution Service to be stripped of its responsibilities in complex fraud cases.

Police calculated the potential loss of about £200 million by examining allegedly inflated prices of contracts awarded during the building of the 11-mile Tube extension from Green Park to Stratford. The figure represents the gap between what the lowest price tenders should have cost and what London Underground ended up paying.

The man who gave the go-ahead for the prosecution was then attorney general Lord Williams of Mostyn. The Labour peer and QC died in September 2003, 18 months after giving his approval on the grounds that it was in the public interest and there was sufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction.

He had been given assurances about its viability by a team of experienced lawyers at the CPS then under the leadership of the Director of Public Prosecutions Sir David Calvert-Smith QC.

They had pored over the evidence gathered in a three-year investigation by British Transport Police. As a result they suggested there should be separate trials involving the conspiracy charges, the allegations of inflated invoices and the laundering of illicit gains from the fraud.

But the whole prosecution would obviously rest on the success or failure of the first main trial which started in June 2003.

The CPS briefed three counsel to present their case in court headed by Patrick Upward QC, who specialises in cases involving white-collar crime. The other two barristers were James Mulholland and Peter Roberts.

They spent an astonishing 14 months presenting the case to the Old Bailey. The jury was asked to consider 1,500 documents and there were 80 agreed submissions from witnesses.

The inquiry into what went wrong will consider whether Mr Upward's team should have put their case more simply and briefly. But many of the delays were beyond its control, including time lost due to jury illness, holidays and paternity leave.

Peter Binning, a partner at Corker Binning, which specialises in business crime, said: "The trial was badly managed from the very beginning. It should have been dealt with by the Serious Fraud Office and not the CPS. We have a lot to learn by examining what went wrong."

The current attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, last night asked the watchdog which oversees the CPS to investigate. Stephen Wooler, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of the CPS, will report on the case.

Chris Newell, a CPS director of casework, said: "The allegations in this case

were very serious and it was clearly in the public interest to bring them before a court and to have them tried by a jury. It is essential that the criminal justice system learns from this experience."

The case will also reopen the debate into whether juries should hear complex fraud cases. An attempt by Labour to scrap juries in such cases was blocked two years ago by opposition peers in the Lords. Ministers are considering trials heard by expert panels.

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