Day 309 - 03 Dec 96 - Page 39
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2 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I do not think it is as simple as that.
3 Sticking to this document, whatever may be said about
4 another document, for instance, the Operations Manual,
5 I find it difficult to see that you can just take parts of
6 these documents and say "we rely on those, they are an
7 admission against interest by McDonald's", which
8 I certainly do not see them as, "but McDonald's cannot rely
9 on any other parts of them". I must say, I have difficulty
10 with that.
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12 MR. MORRIS: The thing is, there are so many thousands of
13 documents in this case.
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15 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I appreciate that, all I am giving you is an
16 opportunity. I have put 'query this' in pencil on my part
17 of it because I wanted to sort it out. I do not care what
18 the result is at the end of the day.
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20 MS. STEEL: Do they still have the letter? It might be
21 helpful. Can I say something about the point that you have
22 just made? The reason why it is different, whether or not
23 whether or not we can rely on them, is because in theory
24 McDonald's could create a whole load of documents just to,
25 sort of, help prove this case, so they should not
26 automatically be able to rely on what is in their own
27 documents, whereas if it is something that is in our favour
28 then, you know, presumably they would not create things in
29 our favour for the purposes of the case. So-----
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31 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I understand that, that is why I made the
32 rider about whatever may be said about the Operations
33 Manual. I see that, but there may be parts there which you
34 say, 'We are entitled to rely on because McDonald's would
35 not have said that. Since now we are looking at it through
36 the eyes of this defamation case, how ever the author was
37 looking at it when he or she wrote it, we can rely upon it
38 as a concession against themselves and there they were when
39 whoever wrote that they wrote it without any consideration
40 of a defamation action like this, and it was the truth and
41 now we want to hold it against them'. I have no problem
42 with that.
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44 The problem I have with pink 7 and 12 is that the
45 information which appears on it, page after page, gives a
46 picture as a whole, and what seems to me to be unreal is to
47 say, 'You can take that into account because it helps us
48 against McDonald's' -- you may not be saying this -- 'but
49 you cannot take what is on the rest of the page into
50 account because it might help McDonald's.' I have to-----
51
52 MS. STEEL: I do not think anyone is saying that about this
53 specific document. I am not.
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55 MR. MORRIS: I do not remember us not agreeing.
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57 MS. STEEL: I thought it might be a mistake.
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59 MR. JUSTICE BELL: What I would like you to do, I am not going
60 to bundle you into a decision right now, but some time
