Ed. (3746)
NOTHING TO BE WRITTEN IN THIS MARGIN
Registry
No. HWB 6/20
DRAFT
LETTER
SECURITY CLASSIFICATION
To:-
Top Secret.
Secret.
Confidential.
Restricted.
Unclassified.
PRIVACY MARKING
The Hon. Gwynneth Dunwoody,
M.P.,
Parliamentary Under-
Secretary,
Board of Trade.
In Confidence
Type 1 +
13
From Lord Shepherd
Telephone No. & Ext.
Department
You will recall the discussion at the
Ministerial Meeting on Hong Kong, held on
22 September, of Hong Kong's request that our
overseas posts should supply information to the
recently established Hong Kong Export Credit
Guarantee Corporation. It was agreed that I
should discuss the proposal further during my
visit to Hong Kong in October, with a view to
finding out more about their requirements so that
it might be determined how far it was practicable
and desirable to meet them.
There have already been some long drawn out
exchanges on this matter between our departments
at official level. Your department concluded
that we could not supply to Hong Kong material
other than of the kind supplied to members of the
Berne Union for security reasons and because of
the additional work-load on staff in our overseas
posts. If Hong Kong has to rely on such
information as membership of the Berne Union
produces, it will, we imagine, be very short of
information of any kind about countries which are
not members of the Union, apart from its inability
to obtain objective economic reports of a general
nature on a much wider range of countries.
As a
/dependent
...