Onassis And Calogeropoulos v Vergottis

If Dear Reader, you are wondering why I have published an obscure House of Lords judgment in a financial dispute on this site, its relevance to a substantial body of my work can be found at page 431 in the second column. In the UK there are statutes of limitations for civil claims, but no such statutes in criminal trials, including and especially for indecent assault, rape and murder. While most reasonable people would agree that no one should be allowed to get away with murder just because the evidence has been buried for years or even decades, we have in recent years seen a slew of demented individuals – men as well as women – coming forward with years or even decades old allegations against teachers, care workers and of late celebrities, allegations that for the most part cannot be disproved.

If at this point you ask since when did a defendant in a criminal trial have to dispove the prosecution case, then clearly you have not heard of the spurious practices of corroboration by volume and trawling for victims. As Paul Gambaccini told a meeting at the Law Society Hall in October this year (2015), in these cases the police no longer require evidence but people who agree. Gambaccini was one of the lucky ones, but at this moment, Rolf Harris and Max Clifford are languishing in prison, Dave Lee Travis has had his name dragged through the mud and been convicted of a solitary misdemeanour after two trials, and even the odious Gary Glitter was convicted of attempted rape against the evidence.

Much of the evidence in these cases was perjured – the 5 women who accused Jimmy Tarbuck; the woman who claimed Travis indecently assaulted her at the opening of a hospital radio station; the woman who was coached by police after accusing Jim Davidson of oral rape...but a lot of it was people reconstructing history in their own minds, as with the woman who accused Harris of indecently assaulting her at a community centre he had never visited, and the man who accused Gambaccini of sexual offences at a time before the presenter decided women were not for him.

There can be no doubt whatsoever that the police and lawyers realise the overwhelming majority of these allegations are either false or fanciful, but don’t care. There is simply no other reasonable explanation.

Re the document itself, a few of its pages are lop-sided, but that is the way they were scanned. I did ask an associate if he could straighten them for me, he did this with one page, but it lost so much quality that I decided this was not worth it.

My thanks to Barbara Hewson who drew my attention to this in her presentation at Goldsmiths on June 6, 2015. As ever, my thanks to Counsel for supplying the actual document.

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