Day 286 - 24 Oct 96 - Page 14
1 the trucks pick up beef but they do not necessarily know
2 what ranches, and whether those ranches are indeed
3 fattening cattle up, or whatever.
4
5 So we have here a chain of hearsay ending up with the
6 presence of Mr. Cesca in the witness box putting McDonald's
7 case, and in the light of all that we would say that not
8 only is that chain of hearsay inadmissible evidence unless
9 it is an admission against interest, but that it is also
10 could be views of experts and is admissible and, in any
11 event, would carry more weight, a hundred times more
12 weight, we would submit, as regards understanding the
13 general picture, especially in the light of the fact that
14 our experts are independent and perhaps McDonald's
15 witnesses are all commercially dependent and loyal to the
16 McDonald's system and they are basically not going to say
17 anything -- Mr. Morganti is not going to say anything that
18 jeopardised his contract.
19
20 But obviously McDonald's got in a pickle with regards the
21 Gioias area in particular, and generally got in a pickle
22 about Brazil as a whole in this case even though he had to
23 deal with its entry into the case.
24
25 Can I just say one other thing? This is a slightly
26 different issue. We heard from Mr. Cesca on day 220, I am
27 not sure of the page number, probably around page 8 or 9,
28 that Mr. Morganti, in some complex commercial
29 inter-relationship, is the director of, or part director
30 of, some complex commercial relationship with - it seems,
31 the same complex that supplies McDonald's in Brazil also
32 exports beef from Brazil, and I will not try to go into the
33 complexity.
34
35 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I did not think it was that complex.
36
37 MR. MORRIS: Right, well, he did change his view from one day
38 to another, Mr. Cesca, and was trying to explain how the
39 relationship worked. But the point is that Mr. Morganti is
40 somebody who is commercially benefiting to the maximum,
41 being a director, from the export of beef from Brazil. So
42 he is not in any way committed to preservation of the
43 environment. I mean, he is committed to the damage to the
44 environment and all the social issues we have heard about,
45 by participating at the highest level in causing those
46 problems, those problems which McDonald's identified as far
47 back as 1982 as being caused by exports of Brazilian beef.
48
49 In fact, further, Glenmark, the trade name, also, as
50 I understood it, exports to the USA and there is a Glenmark
51 supplier of McDonald's on the list of suppliers disclosed
52 by McDonald's in the USA. I want to make a general point
53 on this, to which I know it will be said it is all very
54 well but there is no evidence that any of that Brazilian
55 beef ever arrived at McDonald's in the USA. The
56 inter-relationship between these companies involved in the
57 import/export trade that supply McDonald's in Costa Rica
58 and Brazil and the USA.
59
60 When we are talking about the statistical inevitability of
