Galvin wants to dig for Gillette e-mails

Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin wants to hire a corporate security and investigation firm to recover deleted e-mail messages of Gillette Co. executives that might be pertinent to his investigation of the company's acquisition by Procter & Gamble Co.

In a motion filed yesterday in Suffolk Superior Court, Galvin asked Judge Allan van Gestel for permission to retain Vance International Inc., of Oakton, Va., which would search Gillette systems for five months of e-mails of seven top executives who were involved in the negotiations with P&G, including chief executive James M. Kilts.

Galvin and the company have been fighting over access to documents the Massachusetts regulator said he needs to review to determine whether Gillette shareholders are receiving a fair price in the $57 billion transaction.

In a response to a subpoena from Galvin, Gillette last week revealed in a court filing that some of the requested documents may ''no longer exist" because some employees had a ''regular practice of deleting" e-mail messages.

With the proposed shareholder vote on the acquisition tentatively scheduled for next month, Galvin requested an ''emergency order" from van Gestel to direct Gillette to allow Vance to search for the deleted e-mails ''within five days."

The two sides are scheduled to appear before van Gestel this afternoon.

Gillette spokesman Eric Kraus said the company is reviewing Galvin's most recent request and will ''respond accordingly."

Kraus also said Gillette is ''in the process of evaluating" whether it can recover the deleted materials on its own.

Gillette said top executives were required to preserve all deal-related materials after the P&G offer was disclosed Jan. 28, and that was extended to all employees in February when Galvin and the Federal Trade Commission began inquiries. Before that, Kraus said, ''there were no instructions to save merger-related material because there was no need to."

He said Gillette employees and executives routinely deleted e-mails as a method of preventing computers from overloading.

Last month van Gestel ruled Galvin had the authority to investigate the deal so long as the information sought pertained to the ''fairness opinion" that Gillette's two investment bankers, Goldman Sachs Group and UBS AG, issued to bless the value of the P&G offer.

In a filing last week, Gillette suggested Galvin had already probably gotten most of the materials allowed under van Gestel's ruling as a result of subpoenas to the two investment banks.

Andrew Caffrey can be reached at caffrey@globe.com.