Day 139 - 21 Jun 95 - Page 52
1 franchise?
2 A. None.
3
4 Q. Who bought it?
5 A. None. We were informed after the fact what he had
6 done. My Lord, the environment is we were defaulting him,
7 we were in court. Other than court proceedings under way
8 we had no contact with him. Under the rules of default, he
9 continued to operate with the arch, if you will, but we had
10 no contact with him and no contact other than through the
11 litigation and the lawyers, if you will, and then the next
12 thing we know is that Mr. Miller is calling us saying that
13 he had bought from Mr. Gibson.
14
15 Q. When did you find that out? Was that shortly after he had
16 bought the terminated franchise?
17 A. I cannot say that with certainty because I do not
18 really know the exact timing of when he bought the
19 franchise. As a matter of fact, I have to make some
20 assumptions which I can do, and that is we first became
21 aware of the situation after the stores were closed because
22 of the labour dispute. When I got down there, it was
23 obvious to me that Mr. Miller had already made some
24 substantial investment in the buildings and in the
25 equipment and things such as that, so a period of time had
26 been involved where we did not know about the transfer of
27 ownership, it had been kept from us.
28
29 Q. When you terminated Mr. Gibson's franchise, what did you
30 expect to happen?
31 A. We hoped that the arches, McDonald's arches, would be
32 removed from the building. He could operate a Hamburg
33 restaurant of his own name, any other name, or competitor's
34 name, but it should not operate as a McDonald's.
35
36 Q. But nobody from McDonald's went down there to see whether
37 that had happened?
38 A. I think I mentioned there are legal proceedings under
39 way to try to make that happen.
40
41 MR. MORRIS: When legal proceedings are going on, it would be
42 wrong for you to go and interfere or be around?
43
44 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Can I understand the position. I am not
45 quite sure where we are going for the moment, but let me
46 understand the situation before I ask about that. As
47 I understand it, what you were saying this morning is you
48 thought that if you terminated a franchise you had to go to
49 court to do that?
50 A. Unless there is a voluntarily agreement, my Lord.
51
52 Q. When you say "you go to court", are you going to court just
53 to get the court's approval of the termination, or are you
54 going to court to get an order preventing your licensee
55 from putting himself forward as a McDonald's restaurant or
56 something like that?
57 A. Essentially what we are doing, my Lord, is trying to
58 get our name removed from the building and preclude the
59 operator from using ----
60
