Serious Fraud Office fined £180,000 after sending confidential documents to wrong person in 'astounding' blunder

The Serious Fraud Office has been fined £180,000 after thousands of confidential documents from a high-profile investigation were sent to the wrong person.

The papers, from an investigation into defence giant BAE Systems, contained evidence relating to 64 people and was mistakenly sent to a witness in the case.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK's privacy regulator, said people would be "quite rightly shocked" by the "astounding" blunder after fining the SFO for the first time.

The documents related to the SFO's investigation into allegations that senior executives at BAE Systems had received payments as part of an arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

They included bank statements, hospital invoices, DVLA documents and passport details.

After the probe was closed, the SFO sent more than 2,000 bags of evidence to "Witness A" between November 2011 and February 2013.

It was later found that a "relatively inexperienced" temporary worker, who was not fully supervised, had mistakenly sent 407 of the bags belonging to 64 people to the witness, the ICO said.

Witness A contacted the SFO to say he had wrongly received some evidence but despite considering his concerns at a "senior level", the SFO sent more material to him in May 2012.

The SFO said it had "substantially overhauled its procedures".