TNAG-0311-FCO40-347-Contributions-of-Hong-Kong-for-costs-of-maintaining-military-1971 — Page 4

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30th December 1971

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REF.

Sub File

You should know about a nonsense

that has cropped up over the Defence Costs Agreement. The Secretariat has run into difficulty with Carroll, Acting Regional Director of the DoE, over the negotiation of a "Statement of working principles".

11

So far as I can see everything of

11

substance is tied up and agreed, and of course the building programme is going ahead satisfactorily. But Carroll is trying to extract from the Secretariat a statement to the effect that the contribution to capital works is in fact UK money

It is of course agreed that the programme is carried out to UK scales, standards and specifications, etc., as if the UK were paying for it itself, but this piece of semantics has stuck in the Secretariat's gullet, not least because though it is meaningless it is pregnant with meaning!

I fancy half the problem is that Carroll is acting two grades above his substantive rank. There may have been some faults on our side, but everything went very smoothly until Soper left. I hope the substantive Regional Director will be arriving shortly.

Meanwhile Hugh Norman-Walker and I have had a quiet word with the CBF about this and asked

E.O. Laird Esq., CMG, MBE

LAST PAPER

PA.

AWC

&