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Tak Luk, laid a claim to certain lands in the New Territories, and in the course of about a year, on 7th December 1901, the decision of the Land Court was given. The decision of the Land Court was in favour of the claim by these people and it was the duty of the Land Court if it allowed the claim under Section 14 to report that allowance by the Registrar to the Governor in order that the Governor in due course might order a title appropriate to the case to be granted, or else if he found it inexpedient to grant a title, to refer back to the Court to award compensation --- not to a number of assignees, but to the claimant or claimants.
The Crown was not represented at that hearing. And the Crown was in one sense the standing claimant to all the land there, because under section 1b of the Ordinance all the land was declared to be the property of the Crown except such property as persons shall have a claim to. It was discovered, or the Crown supposed they had discovered, that there had been some mistake in this decision of the Land Court owing, among other things, to the fact that one of the documents, a very important document, brought before the Land Court was alleged to be a forgery.
He was not saying for one second that this was the case; he had not the slightest means of knowing anything about it, but that was one of the reasons mentioned in the affidavit of Mr. Powley, the Crown Solicitor, filed on 24th August 1903. That affidavit contained the suggestion that one of the documents upon which the decision was obtained was a forgery.
The Attorney-General appeared before the Court on 25th August 1903 and was given leave to appeal, any doubt as to whether the Crown was bound by the meaning of the word "claimant" in the other Ordinance being set at rest by the fact that a special Ordinance had been passed (13 of 1903) which gave the Chief Justice...
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