Supermarket probe to trawl millions of emails

The UK's Competition Commission may have to trawl through more than 12 million emails as part of its investigation into the treatment of suppliers by Asda and Tesco.

Asda and Tesco, along with Morrisons and Sainsbury's, are currently the subject of a two-year inquiry by the Competition Commission into the market dominance of the 'big four' supermarket chains.

The Competition Commission has now served a section 109 notice on Asda and Tesco requesting copies of all communications between themselves and their suppliers between June and July this year.

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Both supermarkets have denied the allegations but the investigation is likely to turn up a huge volume of emails for the Competition Commission to examine.

A spokeswoman for Asda said it has received the request from the Competition Commission for the emails and will help "in any way we can".

She said: "We're currently making them aware of the huge volume of emails this will generate - over 11 million - and are asking them if they wish to be more specific about what they're looking for."

It has been reported that the request to Tesco will generate a million emails but a spokesman for the supermarket said it is likely to be "substantially more" than that.

He said: "We are confident that once the Commission has searched through the millions of emails involved, they will find that our relationships with suppliers are professional, that we comply with the industry code of conduct and the steps we take to lower prices bring huge benefits to consumers in this country."

The Competition Commission said it did not know how many emails it will need to examine but added the supermarkets are quoting figures for the total volume of email generated in June and July. A spokesman said: "There are only certain types of correspondence we are interested in."