IT WAS, if memory serves, April 2005 and I was sitting in the courtroom of Her Majesty’s Privy Council. I was covering the appeal by Marjorie Knox in the long-standing Kingsland Estates case.
I was covering the case for the Nation newspaper, my website BSJ Online and a business news show I had just started on VOB.
All my life I had visions of an appeal being heard at the Privy Council as being a rather grand affair, perhaps in the ancient House of Lords itself, with the world stopping in its tracks as the fanfare of the trumpets, played by loyal subjects in Beefeater costumes, who had possibly arrived direct by medieval barge from the Tower of London, called us all to attention.
In reality, the building in which the Kingsland matter was heard was a medium-sized Georgian-style building on the corner of Downing Street, which was part of a longer building stretching along Whitehall. And it seemed that nobody else knew or cared that we were there.
Downing Street being closed off, we had to go through security on the sidewalk next to the big gates, and as elections were in the air there was a small group of eccentric British demonstrators around the gate with placards on which were writ large their favourite slogans, as they chanted things like “Blair Get Out.”
Just two years later, in July 2007, London would experience a major terrorist attack on its transport system.
Meanwhile, every morning for three days, I think, we went up the stairs into a small waiting room to be led into the chamber for the day’s session. This was no ancient House of Lords, but by way of compensation we did find some ancient lords sitting there.
These half-dozen or so learned gentlemen heard the case. I will not attempt to go into the details, but Madge Knox’s appeal was denied. I can say that it turned on how you interpreted a few special clauses put into the partnership agreement written to give each of the Kingsland founder’s children an equal stake in the company.
But as their lordships pointed out as sympathetically as possible, the clauses had been written by an amateur draftsman, and as a result were harder to parse than a verse of Shakespeare.
In the end, the interpretation their lordships used in their ruling defied any logic I could muster, except once, when, with an intense concentration I forced myself to follow their footsteps through clauses which Knox had argued gave her the first right of refusal on any shares the directors wanted to sell to others besides the original offspring or their descendants.
For a fleeting moment, it was clear as day to me – Madge has no claim! – and then almost as quickly it was gone, and to this day, I cannot understand how their lordships reached their conclusion. Which tells you a lot about my brainpower.
By contrast, at least one other ruling, this time from the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), which stemmed from various appeals by Knox against the costs imposed on her by the Barbados courts, made eminent sense to me.
In fact, that ruling served notice on the courts of Barbados that if the level of costs they charged Knox to seek appeals to higher courts were the norm in Barbados, then justice was being denied in this fair land of ours. That CCJ ruling on Kingsland, and others, have also slammed the Barbados courts for taking so long to conclude cases, making the old maxim about justice delayed alive and well in this country.
So what Kingsland taught me about the Privy Council was that it was time for us to move on and take our chances with our own “supreme” court, the Caribbean Court of Justice.
To borrow terms from the Brexit disaster that has left the British government in a shambles, I went from being a Remainer to becoming a Leaver.
Pat Hoyos is a journalist and publisher specialising in business.
Email: pathoyos@gmail.com
