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
