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
