Day 245 - 07 May 96 - Page 58
1 MS. STEEL: The first page just asks about to retract the
2 following allegations concerning rainforest and torture and
3 murder of animals and then this is what is to be printed:
4
5 "Our response to this demand is as follows:
6
7 1. We are now willing to apologise for having repeated
8 claims for which we have been unable to trace specific
9 evidence concerning the connection with McDonald's and the
10 raising of beef on former rainforests;
11
12 2. We are willing to concede that by common usage the
13 words 'murder and 'torture" are not yet widely used in
14 connection with the killing of animals (although by our
15 standard this is indeed the case) and we regret any
16 embarrassment suffered by McDonald's Hamburgers Limited due
17 to this statement.
18
19 Veggies Limited dated" and obviously they had to put the
20 date of when they printed it.
21
22 So your solicitors on your behalf were telling Veggies that
23 they were happy for that correction to go out to rectify
24 what they considered as the wrong information in the
25 leaflet that Veggies had produced.
26
27 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I can see what is in the letter. What
28 concerns me at the moment is where we are going because,
29 for better or worse, McDonald's have now alleged that a
30 number of other things are defamatory and untrue and, at
31 the end of the day, I am going to decide whether that is
32 right or not. So, I am not going to be affected by what a
33 solicitor wrote in 1987 or 1988. I will have 100 times
34 more evidence available to me than the solicitor ever had
35 then.
36
37 MS. STEEL: The solicitors ----
38
39 MR. JUSTICE BELL: But if there is some additional point then
40 make it clear by putting it to the witness.
41
42 MS. STEEL: The solicitors were writing on your behalf, were
43 they not?
44 A. Yes.
45
46 Q. And earlier you said that you felt all these issues were
47 equally serious, you particularly did not like the
48 headlines, the arches across the top, and yet you have not
49 taken any action whatsoever to try and correct what you
50 conceived to be seriously inaccurate allegations in an
51 identical leaflet. Why is that?
52 A. I think that was the hot issue at the time,
53 rainforests, packaging, environment. That is the one that
54 we chose to deal with. I do not remember eight, nine years
55 ago the discussions involving the actual wording but
56 I think it is probably consistent with our attitude towards
57 these issues just as it has been in this case. If someone
58 gets it wrong, they say they got it wrong. We withdrew the
59 writs and would have done so here too.
60
