TNAG-0410-FCO40-456-Allegations-of-bribery-and-corruption-in-the-Hong-Kong-polic-1973 — Page 5

Telephone: London 940 9214

Mr Anthony Royle MP

PROVED IN KÆGISTRY Ne.$1 21 2

HKCK 14/12

Parliamentary Under Secretary of State

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

London SW 1

Dear Mr Royle

20 Bishops Close Ham Common Richmond Surrey

16 November 1973

Rec. and Ack. 20/1/73. H.K.I.O.. Department

for graft reply, please

Mit Royle.

350 346

I write in reaction to some newspaper coverage in Hongkong, in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), which as you may know is partly owned by the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation and Jardine, Matheson & Co Ltd, this last company being owned substantially by Baring Brothers merchant bankers (who made a lot of money from the narcotics trade through their ownership of part of the old Honourable East India Company) and your own next-door neighbours the Keswicks.

My concern is for Hongkong Elected Urban Councillor Mrs Elsie Elliott. I fear the Hongkong establishment might be ganging-up on her again and using its various tools to harm her. She is a dear, courageous, sincere and sometimes dotty friend of mine. Dotty, I say, because in her relentless pursuit of truth and justice in a society only recently officially recognised to suffer and suffer from the cancer of administrative corruption she does things which you and I might never, at least without great self- thought, do: she has, again I am afraid, exposed herself.

She did not do this directly but merely wrote a confidential letter to a British police officer of the Royal Hongkong Police Force, an officer she believes might assist in reaching and recording truth. Knowledge of the existence of this confidential letter and some of its detail came into the possession of a Mr Kevin Sinclair, a reporter of the SCMP, and Mr Sinclair and the SCMP have between them by some mysterious process identified and named officers who Mrs Elliott privately felt might assist her in her enquiries after truth. And now that these officers have been named by Mr Sinclair and the SCMP a policeman has made a complaint against Mrs Elliott, who did not do the naming.

While I know of your attitude to Mrs Elliott, which you have hitherto indicated to me, and indeed which has been indicated to me by Mrs Elliott herself (you may recall flapping your distinguished wrist at her and telling her you had heard of her and wanted to hear not one word from her in a meeting with the Colony's Urban Councillors in Hongkong in recent years at which you had evidently had the intention to seek the Councillors' views) I am sure you might like to consider advising your Office's grubby branch office in Hongkong that it should not by any device attempt further to harm this lady. There are Britons who would, were a crunch to come on the squalid 1966 CID plot issue, when British and Chinese police officers sought to frame Mrs Elliott with inciting rioters, feel the need to take action by means and devices similar to or other than those the criminal elements in the Hongkong Government might be seeking to use to advance their efforts to discredit or destroy this lady.

Your Office, before you attended upon it your own distinguished talents - and indeed throughout the period of authority of the Socialist Government suppressed the truth of the extent and nature of the organised corruption conspiracy in Hongkong and I fear it might, through lack of knowledge be tempted to let pass further attempts to suppress, or aid and abet attempts to bend truth. Therefore I supply to you here a copy of a letter (headed STONES, SWEETS AND BUGGERY) I have sent to the editors of other Hongkong

...OVER/