46
F
It is impossible to misunderstand your first explanation, beyond the fact that the threat of legal proceedings did issue (and very properly in terms of the Attorney General's draft notice) from your Department - a point that was not questioned; there is no reason to doubt, as you do doubt, Mr. Pauncefote's statement that the money was offered at the Treasury on the 3rd Instant, and in terms of the notice over your signature there was no necessity for offering it before. These terms, however, I am to observe, are in direct contradiction to the remark in the Government notification of 1st July last, published in the Gazette for 3 weeks during the month of August; again, when called on for explanation you stated that you had no doubt that the occupant of Lot No. 1415 was and is included in the List submitted on the 3rd Instant to the Court; the matter was really irrelevant, but if you conceived it necessary to introduce it, it was your duty to have ascertained the fact so as to place it beyond doubt not only of yourself, but of the office by which the explanation was required, as this might have been done in five minutes from the documents in your office.
So much for your first explanatory paragraph.
In your next (the Police and Lighting Rate office) you mention an office that does not exist, as the Rates in question are now payable under the Ordinance at the Colonial Treasury.
From your third explanation the only inference is that you signed a blank notice and omitted to exercise the most ordinary supervision over the subordinate to whom you entrusted the delicate duty of filling up a document, important from its being one of a series, called for by...