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THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES
CO 537/1374
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information is given in the enclosed Terms and Conditions of supply of National Archives' leaflet.
ins
It is clear that those who inspired and those who drafted the proposed legislation know perfectly well that the liquidatore appointed by the Japanese were not agents of the Banks, that they did not act as such agents in taking the money of the Bank's debtors or stealing it and putting it in their masters' pockets, and that payment of a pre-war debt to the liquidators was not payment to the rightful creditors. The draft legislation proceeds on the basis of creating a legal fiction that, as a matter of law, a Custodian or Liquidator did act on behalf of the Banks which they despoiled, that there was such a being as a Custodian who took into his custody and preserved moneys due to enemy subjects, that an agent may still be an agent although his authority has been terminated or even bepudiated. This legal fiction is forced into statutory form by a series of definitions of agent, custodian and liquidator and false assumptions as to the authority of repudiated agents, and illegally appointed liquidators to act on behalf of their
artifices which cannot deceive, are an affront to victims, logic and a reproach to any system of law that permits of such
contortions.
3.
If it is suggested that the end Justifies the means, and that a twisting of the connotations and of the law is justified by some moral, social or "equitable" object, the facts so far as they have been investigated in Hong Kong fail t to disclose any reason that would justify such startling and
violent repudiation of legal principles.
It has already been shown in previous correspondence
(a) that inquiries of debtors and investigations have
not disclosed any case where the Japanese compelled
a debtor to pay his debt to the liquidator by duress. They sent stereotyped letters to debtors "requesting" them to make arrangements for the payment of their debts. That no duress was exerted is supported by the following facts (1) that thirty-eight Chinese whose debts totalled HK.$7,700,000. were residnét
in Hong Kong during the occupation
period and did not pay.
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