Day 259 - 10 Jun 96 - Page 68


     
     1        as your Lordship knows -- I want this case, as your
     2        Lordship does, to finish, and I would like it to finish, if
     3        it can, some time around the middle of July.  I am very
     4        resistant, knowing what the Defendants do when they get
     5        material in cross-examination -- which is to spend (I would
     6        say this bluntly) hours and hours and hours going round in
     7        circles and getting nowhere -- disclosing material which
     8        I do not have to disclose, because I know what will
     9        happen.  There will be endless questions about matters
    10        which have nothing whatever to do with the case.
    11
    12   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  How many other dates are there where there
    13        are notes, where dates are mentioned now in all of the
    14        statements, the notes have not been disclosed?
    15
    16   MR. RAMPTON:  That is one of them.  There is no secret that the
    17        vast majority of the occasions where the inquiry agents
    18        attended London Greenpeace -- the inquiry agents that I am
    19        calling -- attended London Greenpeace meetings have already
    20        been notified to the Defendants, and so have the notes been
    21        disclosed, because on the vast majority of the occasions
    22        either McDonald's was discussed, and that goes right
    23        through until September 1990, or else the Defendants or one
    24        of them or both was there.  But there are some occasions,
    25        like 17th May when Mr. Bishop was there, when neither of
    26        those things occurred.  I think, so far as he is concerned,
    27        that is the only one.
    28
    29   MR. JUSTICE BELL: Can you remember how many dates there are all
    30        together where you would positively wish to see the notes,
    31        apart from 17th May?  Are there any others?
    32
    33   MS. STEEL:   Yes.  Obviously, we want them all, but the point is
    34        that this one is actually referred to in the witness
    35        statements.  The point is, anyway, that if Mr. Rampton's
    36        problem is that we might ask irrelevant questions, then
    37        that can be dealt with at the time that the questions are
    38        asked, if it is considered that they are in fact
    39        irrelevant.
    40
    41   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Yes.  I quite accept you have challenges to
    42        put and information you may want to get from the witnesses
    43        in cross-examination in order to mount your arguments about
    44        publication in due course.  But I am going to have to rely
    45        on you to restrict yourself to what you think will really
    46        help as opposed to just exploring what happened at each of
    47        the meetings.  That is where the line will have to be
    48        drawn, as you probably appreciate.
    49
    50   MS. STEEL:  I think, you know, in that respect it is obviously 
    51        going to save time, because if we can clearly see that 
    52        McDonald's was not discussed at the meetings, then we can 
    53        just say to the witness: "You agree that there was nothing
    54        discussed about McDonald's at this meeting", or that
    55        I wanted to talk about the IMF campaign, or something like
    56        that, so that we can see clearly, you know, what our
    57        participation is supposed to be.
    58
    59        If I could just say that Mr. Rampton said about disclosing
    60        anything where we had attended, and things about whether

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