mented on by the Hong Kong magistrate that the fugitives were not notified of the appeal to the Supreme Court. We do not know whether this is true. Mr Hill expects the judgement off (iii) of the telegram to show whether all previous proceedings were taken into account in which case it might be considered that nothing was lost to the defendants in that no defence was entered.
It may also be necessary to ask Lisbon to try to discover whether the defence lawyer there consulted the Macau defence lawyer before deciding not to defend his clients against the appeal. If the Macau lawyer was not consulted it may well be possible that the defendants' arguments went by default.