Details of how a Clifford Chance partner coached a witness for a High Court trial have been revealed in the judgment.

Clifford Chance Asia in Singapore was acting for a defendant accused of transferring around US$600m to US$800m from a group of companies into his personal bank accounts. Three weeks before the start of the trial, the Magic Circle firm held training sessions in their Sydney offices for the witnesses to practise responses to possible cross-examination questions. CC carried out the sessions in front of other witnesses and the defendant.  One of the witnesses who attended the sessions said that the Clifford Chance team "led" a witness Jerome Anthony Perez De La Sala (Tony) to give "correct" answers every time he "made a mistake".

During the trial Tony read out key dates from a post-it note when he was being cross-examined. One of the dates was over 25 years ago, and so the claimants' lawyer and Justice Quentin Loh asked Tony how he remembered the dates. The judge said that Tony then began to "fudge his answers" because "he knew he was entering into deep water". Tony eventually told the court that he had got the dates from an underlying document. When the judge asked to see the document, the Clifford Chance partner for the defence claimed it was privileged. The judge ordered that it be produced; the document turned out to be a 14-page "script" with questions and answers that Tony had created from the training sessions.

  He kept repeating to himself that he was still his own person
Justice Loh said that whilst witness familiarisation was legitimate, witness coaching by the legal team was not permissible. He concluded that the evidence given by Tony and other defence witnesses "should be accorded negligible weight" due to CC's training sessions and the crib-sheet.

The Singapore Law Society is, according to sources, investigating the partner involved for breaching ethical conduct rules. The society has previously refused to to be drawn, as a spokesman said it had to "ensure the confidentiality of the proceedings" and "cannot comment on any disciplinary matter".

A Clifford Chance spokesman declined to comment.
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