30 June '03 - Letter from Alex Henney to Tony McGarahan

Dear Mr. McGarahan,

Re "private and confidential"

I have discussed the significance of letters marked "Private and Confidential" with Sir Jeremy Lever, and he confirmed my general view of the matter.

One of the purposes of EMAG is to provide information for our members. We cannot generally achieve that objective through (so called) confidential correspondence or confidential meetings (which is one reason we declined the invitation to attend a recent meeting with Messrs. Treves and Thomson as we had no wish to sign a confidentiality agreement). Naturally if we consider that for some reason it is in EMAG's interest to receive genuinely confidential information, then we would agree to keep such confidence. I emphasise "genuinely" because the claim that the recent refusal to provide us with information that was confidential is patent nonsense, especially as the information we sought will be published in Penrose in due course. The other reason that was given was that the information "would not be of interest to continuing policyholders". We do not believe that; we would not put ourselves to the (unpaid) trouble of seeking the information with a view to making it available (again without reward to ourselves) to EMAG members most of whom are continuing policyholders.

Treves in his open letter to the members of the Society 1 March 2001 stated "I will communicate openly. This is our Society and members are entitled to know everything about how it is run unless open disclosure would be commercially damaging". Thomson in a letter of June 2001 to my predecessor, Vincent Nolan, stated "I wish to run the Society in a more open and accountable manner". We deeply regret that The Equitable has not in practice been run on any such basis, but run as a secret society.

Naturally we would respect confidentiality based on a reasoned explanation if the Society believe that, while it is right to communicate something to the Committee of EMAG, it would be damaging to the Society for the communication to be disseminated more widely. (We have indeed asked confidentiality of the Society for a meeting we are having with Thomson regarding a sensitive matter). Otherwise, we shall assume that any heading "Private and Confidential" has been attached to material sent to us because of use of a standard form and is not be understood as binding us.

Yours sincerely,

ALEX HENNEY

c.c. Mr. C. Thomson
EMAG Committee
EMAG website