Day 280 - 17 Jul 96 - Page 23


     
     1        before we go any further, because obviously my decision one
     2        way or another on this matter may affect what happens next
     3        and on what sort of timescale.
     4
     5   MR. STARMER:   Yes.
     6
     7                          (Short adjournment)
     8
     9   MR. STARMER:   My Lord, I am grateful for the time.  I have just
    10        one or two points to make by way of reply.  The first
    11        concerns the public interest in other cases being pursued
    12        in the Courts, and it is simply to say this.  That the
    13        scale and delay caused by joining third parties at this
    14        stage would be considerably smaller and more limited than
    15        the scale and delay of any proceedings hereafter, and that
    16        it really is not credible to argue that the proposed third
    17        parties would be unable to get the legal advice they needed
    18        over the next two or three months.
    19
    20             So far as it is said that March '96 was the right time
    21        to make the application, my answer to that is that cannot
    22        be right.  It does not really depend on when the Defendants
    23        raised the defence of ...(Inaudible)... it depends on when
    24        the Defendants succeeded in their application to widen
    25        their case.  Their application to do so was disputed.  The
    26        Court therefore needed to rule and nobody could know before
    27        that ruling which way it would go and then, of course, went
    28        off to appeal in late June of this year and the delay
    29        between the Court of Appeal date and today is probably at
    30        the most fourteen days, I think, and that time really it
    31        has taken to get this application off the ground.
    32
    33             As for the point your Lordship made to me that the
    34        question of consent and whether there is any claim that
    35        McDonald's can effectively make against the proposed third
    36        parties, I am instructed that the concession already made
    37        today that McDonald's are not claiming damages by
    38        dissemination by the third parties has not been made before
    39        and therefore that comes new today.  Secondly, that in any
    40        event, the concession is, has not even been made today and
    41        I appreciate my learned friend is preserving their position
    42        for their final submission but it is not made today.  It is
    43        therefore up for grabs still.  There may yet be an argument
    44        from the Plaintiffs that these Defendants are liable in
    45        relation to the distribution by the proposed third parties,
    46        and, if that is right, they are entitled, on my reading of
    47        the 1978 Act, to claim a contribution through those
    48        proposed third parties and, to some extent it is premised,
    49        on the rulings of the Court, but at the moment they are
    50        potentially liable for that.
    51
    52   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Do you have the Act there?
    53
    54   MR. STARMER:   It is in the White Book, Volume 2, page 1798
    55        paragraph -- well, page 1798 is probably the easiest.  Or
    56        paragraph 5900.
    57
    58   MR. ATKINSON:   I do not know if your Lordship wanted to mark a
    59        copy.  I did take a photocopy.
    60

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