Russ Jarvis
Management Officer
BTC Hong Kong
by faxlok
RESTRICTED
1
нко 406/
R+
14 JAN 1993
INDE
file copy
Foreign & Commonwealth
Office
London SWIA 2AH
Telephone: 071-
13 January, 1993
Dear Russ,
FUTURE CONSULATE
HKD 406/2
NERAL
GENERAL BUILDING:
2
215 ов
PRIVATE TREATY GRANT
Our telno 2 referred to consulting Ministers about the PTG and problems in getting the language we want on SC14.
1.
Mr Goodlad has now agreed that we should seek better conditions in the event of expropriation than HKG have so far offered. We recommended enlisting the aid of the
Constitutional Affairs Bureau and we will be in touch with you more formally in due course to run our proposals by you.
2.
In the meantime I enclose our preferred version of SC14 and would be grateful if you could let Johnson Stokes and Masters (JSM) take a further look at it. As you will see, we found their suggestions (conveyed to me under cover of your letter of 11 November) helpful and have incorporated most of them. The version I attach has been agreed by OED and Legal Advisers here. We are conscious that in asking for 36 months' notice we are probably being over optimistic, but this is our ideal. Other changes were governed by our desire to strengthen as much as possible provisions for equivalent reinstatement in premises of a similar standard and to get away from basing compensation on depreciated values. We are now drawing up minutes of the 6 January meeting of Mr Hum's Steering Committee which discussed these matters; these will be copied to you in due course.
3.
I will not burden you with a blow by blow account of how we settled on the language in our latest version. There is one point on which you may find it useful to have the background to our thinking. We have left the language in the second line of the JSM draft, i.e. expropriation of "all of the lot" rather than "all or any part of the lot" as it stands in the HKG draft. It was felt by OED that it would be preferable to have the right of expropriation applying to the whole site and not to part only. (They took the view that spelling out the right to appropriate part of the site was best avoided and that if the Grantor were to require part of the site only for normal public purposes, it should be possible to negotiate separately on this). Nevertheless, we agreed that if we were able to secure language meeting our
406/1.ptg.dbj
RESTRICTED
IS