44 Wellfit Street Ltd v GMR Services Ltd

What happened

In a commercial property dispute, the defendant produced a series of internal communications from their own systems, including emails, letters, diary entries and screenshots, to support their claim. The court examined the documents and found conflicting versions, metadata inconsistencies, and signs of tampering. Chief Master Marsh found that the defendant had engaged in deliberate falsification and had knowingly put forward evidence that was false. Under CPR 32.19, the claimant's authentic versions of the disputed documents were treated as admitted, and a possession order was made in the claimant's favour. The case is a direct example of the risk inherent in relying on centralised, self-produced digital records in adversarial proceedings: where both parties produce their own versions of electronic communications, credibility turns on which set of documents is more forensically consistent, a determination that independent contemporaneous proof would have made straightforward.