Bunhill: Followed to letter

SPEAKING of German archives, I hear they proved the undoing of Gordon Foxley, the former MoD procurement official who was convicted last week for taking pounds 1.5m in bribes.

Foxley thought he was safe from investigation. Indeed the man who administered his Swiss-registered company once boasted: 'Scotland Yard or Sherlock Holmes has no possibility of making investigations in Switzerland.'

Sure enough, copies of one key piece of evidence - an incriminating letter that ended with a post-script instructing recipients to destroy it after reading - could not be found in England or Switzerland.

Unluckily for Foxley, clerks at Gebruder Junghans, which makes fuses for the British Army, ignored the instruction. MoD fraud squad officers, armed with a court order, found the letter safely and efficiently filed at the company's Black Forest factory.

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