Day 190 - 23 Nov 95 - Page 40
1 bonds or a broker on his behalf. So it is a customer in
2 the broad sense.
3
4 MR. RAMPTON: Yes, it looks like it, which is what one would
5 expect, of course.
6
7 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes. Mr. Rampton, of course, I love legal
8 theory as much as anyone, but one has to look at where one
9 is going to go at the end of the day and this argument is
10 important. I am going to ask Mr. Morris in a moment if he
11 has tried to trace Mark Ryan or Lynval. I do not know when
12 the matter first came to Mr. Morris' or Ms. Steel's
13 attention. The letter from Miss Lamb is in December 1993;
14 so it is already six and a half years -- six and three
15 quarters years, for instance, after she interviewed Mark
16 Ryan; query whether Ms. Steel or Mr. Morris knew some time
17 before then of the interview, but it is likely they got to
18 know for some years. If they write to your instructing
19 solicitors and say, "Do you know where Mark Ryan or Lynval
20 are now?" and if the answer is yes, they can trace them and
21 if the answer is, "No, we have no trace of where Mark Ryan
22 went after he left Holborn and we do not know where Lynval
23 went after he left Kentish Town", are they not going to
24 have a Civil Evidence Act ground, looking at page 594 of
25 Phipson?
26
27 MR. RAMPTON: My Lord, they might have, is all I would say at
28 the moment. I am just having a look at the rule itself
29 which, perhaps, does not matter. Order 38, rule 25:
30
31 "The reasons referred to [for not calling a
32 person] are that the person in question is dead,
33 or beyond the seas or unfit by reason of his
34 bodily or mental condition to attend as a
35 witness or that" -- and this is, perhaps, the
36 one that matters -----
37
38 MR. JUSTICE BELL: It is. It is the one I am looking at.
39 ".... despite the exercise" -----
40
41 MR. RAMPTON: "..... despite the exercise of reasonable
42 diligence it has not been possible to identify or find
43 him". My Lord, my recollection is -- and Mrs. Brinley-Codd
44 is just checking it now, I think -- my recollection is that
45 Lynval has been in the Defendants' pleading almost since
46 the Particulars of Justification were first served back in
47 19 ..... -- and what is significant, as I recall, is that
48 in the Defendants' pleading Lynval is spelt differently
49 from how Miss Lamb spells it.
50
51 MR. JUSTICE BELL: It is spelled L-L-E and she spells it with
52 one "L", I think, or the other way around.
53
54 MR. RAMPTON: I think, in the original pleading, it was spelt
55 with a "Y" -- L-Y-N -----
56
57 MR. JUSTICE BELL: She spells it with a "Y".
58
59 MR. RAMPTON: I missed that then. But it is differently
60 spelled, which may be quite significant in the sense that
