Day 245 - 07 May 96 - Page 12
1 "This is the Mcfact card number 3, 100 per cent pure beef.
2 Dated 1990.
3
4 All McDonald's beef comes from E.E.C. Approved European
5 suppliers. Every consignment of beef arriving at the meat
6 plant is subject to a total of 36 separate quality control
7 checks carried out by a team of qualified technologists.
8 If a consignment should fail on any one check it will be
9 rejected by McDonald's."
10
11 That is what it says, yes?
12 A. Yes.
13
14 Q. We have heard from Mr. David Walker, who is the Managing
15 Director of McKeys, that, for example, there was 3
16 categories of bacterial contamination for raw beef
17 consignments arriving at the plant and they were
18 categorised as satisfactory, passable, and unsatisfactory.
19 He said that unsatisfactory beef would still be used by the
20 Company because it had already gone through. It was an
21 educational test or check.
22
23 MR. JUSTICE BELL: There was an awful lot more to it than that.
24
25 MR. MORRIS: Yes, but, effectively, unless, he said, it looked
26 or smelt bad, it would go through. What I am saying is
27 that was ----
28
29 MR. RAMPTON: I am sorry, this is an exercise in apples and
30 oranges. With respect, it is absolutely hopeless. We are
31 going to be here for weeks while Mr. Morris gives
32 selective, and I have to say in this case, wholly
33 misleading accounts of the evidence to the witness who has
34 not got the transcript, and then asks, on that bogus
35 premise, the witness a question. It is absolutely
36 hopeless.
37
38 MR. JUSTICE BELL: If you want to put what a witness said,
39 I must ask you to put the transcript. You still face this
40 problem, that Mr. Walker was not the only person who gave
41 evidence on this and, at the end of the day, one of the
42 tasks I am going to have to do is sort out where I have
43 evidence from a number of different sources, different
44 witnesses, different documents, in so far as a matter of
45 fact is relevant to an issue, and I must decide what the
46 facts are.
47
48 The difficulty when you are putting it to Mr. Preston is he
49 cannot have that overview of the evidence. If he has read
50 the transcripts and remembers it all, he has a much better
51 memory than I have. You may be asking him for his comment
52 on what one witness has said in one place which is far from
53 the complete picture.
54
55 MR. MORRIS: I just assumed ----
56
57 MR. JUSTICE BELL: We have quite a lot of evidence about what
58 "Unsatisfactory" meant and whether it actually meant that
59 the food was in any way unfit to eat or whether it had
60 other connotations.
