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presumably
because the
on to this
Japanese Jocely
re-affirmed in a written record that abnormal escalation could be written into "force majeure". The comparative ease with which he accepted this certainly came as a surprise to me, remembering how rigid he had been about the "force majeure" in the past and it was precisely for this reason that he was asked to reconfirm his view, which he did without hesitation. All this therefore re- assured all of us here that Haddon Cave and the Steering Group and (presumably) the Governor were looking for waysof helping the Anglo/Italian bid forward and were confident that it met the immediate requirements.
This impression was further strengthened by the fact that although Picagli stayed on call for three days after the second session of discussions on the counter bid on 3 December and although Kindersley, Scott and Kline were avail- able on call, neither Haddon Cave personally nor the Steering Group generally seemed to find it necessary to call them back to discuss any substantive further points. As reported in my Creda 149 they concerned themselves only with the problem of reducing the built in escalation (which also reduced the ceiling price) and asked if an arrangement could be devised to bridge the gap between it and the point at which "force majeure" would be applied. Kindersley put forward a scheme for this escalation and "force majeure" which laddon Cave and Sandberg appeared to find acceptable. It is true that the purpose of this was to reduce the ceiling price; but this was really only playing with. figures since what really mattered in the end was the conceptual approach and the actual cost which might emerge from the detailed negotiations when more technical data was available and this was confidently predicted to be below $5,000 million except for the, apparently accepted, "force majeure" circumstance. suggestion that they thought the counter bid was not good enough and certainly no hint that the fact that the maximum ceiling proposed was over $5,000 million would disqualify it.
100
There was no
We had heard indirectly via CBC that the Governor had advised London that some thing had to be done to reduce the escalation provisions but when this was mentioned by Picagli and Weedon to Haddon Cave he said that he thought that this had been based on a very quick conversation that he had had with the Governor over the weekend and had to an extent been overtaken by the subsequent proposals for reducing the amount of built in escalation and covering the gap.
We had also heard indirectly that the Secretary of State was planning to ask the Italian Government whether they would reduce their price for the civil contract
or at least the escalation element in it and we assumed that this was proposed as a result of some indication that the prospects would be improved if the price could be reduced. But as I have said neither point was pressed by the Steering Group on the negotiators here.
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It therefore came as a considerable surprise to us here when we were told that the EXCO had rejected the Anglo/Italian counter bid and had plumped for the Japanese. I suspect also that it came as a surprise to many of the officials within XCO itself perhaps even including the Governor. He very kindly asked' the Colonial Secretary (Denys Roberts) to way lay me at an official function that we were all attending that afternoon to let me know the news as quickly as possible; in the event the Colonial Secretary did not succeed in intercepting me It is but managed to contact me on the way to a reception early in the evening. perhaps significant that he chose to use the words that the Governor had asked him to let me know that "things had gone wrong in EXCO". Denys Roberts under- standably did not feel able to enter into much detail with me about what happened at the EXCO meeting. But what did emerge from a sort of cross
questioning /
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