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

Prev Next Index