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OFFICE OF THE BRITISH SENIOR REPRESENTATIVE, SINO-BRITISH JOINT LIAISON GROUP
St John's Building
33 Garden Road
PO Box 528
Hong Kong
(Yes: see
Telephone 5-8682171,5-8682416, 5-8682431, 5-8682435
C T Wood Esq
Hong Kong Department
(D
FCO HKB 020/4.
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McLaren
You may have to
نسمان
I hope soseccont reventives to le Lishin know that
I know Catarino
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Your reference
Our reference
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Date 15 May 1989
en London
M15
Correel
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R Mr Falay
Mis Magsies но вбил
Dean Chris,
exy panto.
Fascinating - it's a different world!
THE JLG ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER
1.
I went to visit Joao Ramos, my opposite number on the Portuguese JLG, on 12 May. With all due acknowledgement
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of the truth of Rod Bunten's paragraph 3 of his teleletter of 19 April, another major difficulty has been that Ramos has spent a good deal of his time in Lisbon since the official establishment of the JLG Offices in Macau. It did not help that the Portuguese Consulate-General in Hong Kong denied absolutely that the Portuguese had set up their Office in Macau and insisted that all the staff were still permanently in Lisbon. It turned out not to be so. Although Ramos does not yet have his own Office, he is accommodated with the Macanese Department of Public Works in a rather fine office. The Portuguese JLG Offices are still under construction and would be ready, he hoped, in a few months.
2.
Ramos said despite the assistance from his Land Commission colleagues he felt a bit isolated. The fifth JLG session was scheduled for late July and he doubted whether the Portuguese team would be in a position to make much of a contribution. Ambassador Coelho had already departed and Catarino (who he described as in the Nato Secretariat rather than the EC Commission) would not be ready to take up his new duties until early June. Henriques de Jesus was involved fulltime in the Portuguese Employment Commission and gave no more than a passing interest to JLG affairs. Vitorino was already disengaged and of course there was no new Diplomatic Adviser to the Governor of Macau. He was hoping that someone who was due to be posted in the Embassy in Peking could be diverted to this latter job, but all was still unclear. He also said that Gaspar, although remaining the President's Adviser on Asia, now had nothing to do with Macau (paragraph 7 of Keith Evetts' teleletter of 13 April). It may be of interest to Lisbon that the new LUSA correspondent in Hong Kong told me the same thing adding that Soares had been angry on arrival in Macau on his recent visit because of the poor quality of the briefing he had received and that Gaspar had been removed from this work as a result. Ramos' overall comment on all this was "Macau is a long way from Lisbon".
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