Day 167 - 02 Oct 95 - Page 60
1 early part of 1994, for example, for some one or more of
2 these people mentioned on these sheets of handwritten paper
3 showed that that person was scheduled to work, I do not
4 know, maybe 39 or 45 hours in a week; the question I would
5 ask is: Where does that leave your Lordship, given that
6 the evidence is that people are not forced to work when
7 they do not want to?
8
9 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I think, if I were to go along that line, I
10 would limit the period of time we are concerned with. All
11 I am saying is if, in a situation like this, one is, at the
12 end of the day, taking a pragmatic course -- that is, it
13 may be that matters are arguably relevant but one is
14 looking at what reward one might get from the effort
15 involved -- then the first stage is, perhaps, to find when
16 the manual sheets stopped, and if they stopped at some
17 relevant time one might say two or three months before that
18 which, itself, would be quite a large number of documents
19 but, for instance, only 12 or 13 sheets for a quarter might
20 be justified and then one would look at that and either
21 side could argue, well, that encourages one to look for
22 more or deters one from looking for more. I mean, if, at
23 the end of the day, it is a pragmatic rather than a
24 theoretical problem -- anyway, I have expressed the way I
25 feel at the moment about it.
26
27 MR. RAMPTON: My Lord, I understand that. I made, to my own
28 mind, the same reservation that your Lordship expressed
29 openly, which was that, of course, neither side -- we
30 because we did not know about them; the Defendants perhaps
31 because they have only recently known about them -- is
32 actually calling any of these people as a witness, and
33 beyond that one has no idea what the sources of Mr. Logan's
34 knowledge might be thought to be. We would have to wait
35 and find out about that.
36
37 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I appreciate that. One way of resolving it
38 is to say no more discovery; we will hear the present
39 witness and then we will hear what Mr. Logan says, but then
40 that is some way ahead and if the matter did come to
41 something and I did feel more documentation or discovery
42 was justified we would be doing it all weeks later than we
43 would have otherwise have done it.
44
45 MR. RAMPTON: Would your Lordship encourage us, then, just to
46 find out what, for the moment at least, the factual
47 position is so far as these schedules are concerned?
48
49 MR. JUSTICE BELL: That is what I would like you to do.
50
51 MR. RAMPTON: Then report to your Lordship in the near future,
52 as soon as we can. Mr. Richards has already given some
53 evidence about it, but we will -- might we speak to him
54 about this specific problem, if we think it should help us?
55
56 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I think so. You see, the thing which occurs
57 to me, the last thing one wants to do is to encourage a
58 whole flood of extra witnesses, but a bit of judicious
59 examination of what has been said so far might be helpful.
60 I mean, if one picked one or two of the Crew Members who
