A former employee of Telecom Fiji PTE Limited, Patrick Victor Adrian has applied for leave to appeal while the legal counsel for TFL stresses that the proceedings would have continued as scheduled if the trial dates were not vacated.
Defence counsel, Jagath Karunaratne says this is to appeal a judgement delivered by the High Court on the 12th of November, 2024, where Adrian’s application for specific discovery was dismissed.
It is alleged that Adrian leaked sensitive matter of Telecom Fiji Limited by transferring the information using his work email to his personal gmail.
TFL’s counsel says the trial dates were set down from 6th of February, 2024 to seek specific discovery of documents and assigned from the 12th to the 13th of November this year.
The counsel says that on the 10th of January last year, Adrian engaged new lawyers, and stressed that they had 8 months prior to the scheduled trial date to file the application.
She says that despite having sufficient time and full knowledge of the issues in dispute, the defendant failed to take any steps to pursue such an application in a timely manner.
The counsel of TFL says Victor and his counsel chose to remain inactive and only filed the application for specific discovery on the 26th of September, 2024.
She further says that this was a strategic or planned move to vacate the trial date.
Karunaratne says they will leave the matter to the High Court.
The matter is adjourned to the 22nd of August.
