TNAG-0550-FCO40-645-Allegations-of-corruption-and-bribery-in-Hong-Kong-police-an-1975 — Page 50

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'E'

my office was that there was simply not enough evidence to justify criminal proceedings against any of the police officers concerned. So far as I know, the civil action

is still under way.

There is nothing that I can helpfully add to

what I have written to the newspapers.

I now turn to general matters arising out of Mrs. Elliott's letter to Johnson, with which I feel that I must deal though they do not arise out of Mr. CHAN's case.

As Mrs. Elliott says in her letter to Johnson, she has been getting at the Attorney General's Chambers for some 5 years in respect of our decisions about the institution or non-institution of prosecutions, and in relation to a few individual cases where she has alleged impropriety of one kind or another. One useful point at least has emerged from her letter to Johnson and that is that she attributes the start of her attacks to a case involving a young girl about 5 years ago. No one here has been really sure what the initial cause was.

I am also enclosing (bundle 'E') copies of all the correspondence about this case and a related one, which involved the same man, and an extract from the Hong Kong Standard of 23rd July, 1971, when Mrs. Elliott made the matter public. names of the people involved were, I think, obliterated from the letters at the time when we were preparing the bundle in case the correspondence had to be published here. Of course, I still have the originals. I called a few days ago for the Police files and find that the police did not suggest that the case should not go forward. They pointed out that it was weak and asked for advise, proposing that Crown Counsel should conduct the committal proceedings if we decided that the case should go forward. The then Director of Public Prosecutions personally decided not to proceed.

The

Mrs. Elliott did indeed take part in one of the "Meet the Press' programmes, along with 3 newspapermen. In the course of the programme, she attacked the independence of the I.C.A.C. in the way she states in her letter to Johnson and made some sweeping generalised allegations about the Legal Department. She announced that we are to be her next "target", though to be fair to her I feel, having listened to the tape of the programme, that she was rather pushed into this by the line taken by some of the other: participants in the programme. Though I naturally do not welcome what was said, I am not too concerned about the public impact of it except in relation to what she said about the handling of corruption cases, in with which I deal in my next paragraph. However, Mrs. Elliott has been proved generally right about corruption in the Police Force,