Day 241 - 26 Apr 96 - Page 05
1
2 Q. You are quite sure of that?
3 A. Yes.
4
5 Q. Just one particular point, are you quite sure that
6 Miss Bensilum said that the policy was "formulated" rather
7 than "formalised"?
8 A. At the time that was the most important word in some
9 ways, in the whole conversation, because I was well aware
10 that McDonald's had been accused of contributing to
11 deforestation by buying beef from farms which had been
12 responsible for deforestation and I was aware that these
13 allegations had been made in the mid 1980s, and
14 specifically that they had been made in the leaflet which
15 is the subject of these proceedings; and I, therefore,
16 attached great significance to the word "formulated"
17 because I understood it to mean that until these
18 allegations started to be made, the Company have not
19 addressed this issue in any organised sense at all and it
20 was only in response to these allegations that it began to
21 consider what response it should make.
22
23 This is why I continued to press her because she used the
24 word "formulated", but made what I took to be a very weak
25 assertion or an unsupported assertion that previously there
26 had been an awareness of the need not to use meat from
27 deforested land. I told her to make inquiries. She
28 really, she could supply no evidence to support this
29 assertion, so I asked her to telephone the Head Office of
30 the company in Chicago, and I said there must be some
31 further -- if you really had such a policy before 1988,
32 there must be something on paper somewhere in Chicago which
33 supports this assertion.
34
35 When she came back to me on the third occasion it was quite
36 clear that she had nothing at all to support that assertion
37 and, therefore, I am absolutely certain that the word
38 "formulated" was indeed the word she used, and it was
39 because she did use that word that I then asked my editor
40 if I could write an article. The substance of that
41 article, had it been published -- and, regrettably, The
42 Observer elected not to publish an article; I suspect the
43 reason it did not was that it was aware that these
44 proceedings were active -- but had The Observer published
45 an article, its thrust would have been that McDonald's had
46 admitted that it did not have a policy on deforestation
47 until the allegations in the leaflet and elsewhere began to
48 be made.
49
50 Q. OK. That is your signature at the bottom of this statement
51 and it is dated 20th July 1993; is that correct?
52 A. Yes.
53
54 Q. We go onto the second statement which has a black line
55 across the top, "Data & Control Equipment Faxbox". The
56 first statement that was. Did you have your notes at the
57 time that you wrote this statement?
58 A. I wrote it from my notes.
59
60 Q. Right. The second statement: "Supplementary statement of
