Patrick Bracher | Partner | Norton Rose Fulbright South Africa | mail me |
How to politely tell someone they are lying.
In a recent case which went through two courts in the UK relating to a ‘fiscally clandestine organisation’, the evidence of the various ‘utterly dishonest’ witnesses was described in the following phrases which you may find useful:
- One witness was ‘egregiously dishonest’ and in his evidence was ‘as heroically dishonest as he is in everyday life’.
- The witness gave evidence which revealed that he ‘regards telling the truth as simply no more than a lifestyle choice’.
- Each witness was attempting to outdo the other in a ‘rich display of competitive dishonesty’.
- The appeal court congratulated the judge for having salvaged some objective facts ‘from the tangled web of deceit which the parties had so enthusiastically weaved when giving their evidence’.