Privy Council to lunch

The men who took Tonga’s Privy Council to lunch

John Herbert Meier seems to attract lawyers like flies with sometimes sticky results.

There is Gordon A. Haz lewood, the Vancouver lawyer who says he had two audiences in 1977 with Tonga’s King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV and Prime Minis ter Fatafehi Tu’ipelehake while setting up the short lived Bank of the South Pacific. He and Meier also took the Privy Council to lunch, Hazlewood said in a 1977 interview in Vancouver.

In February, 1981, Haz lewood was indicted along with Meier by a Los Angeles grand jury for a

1974 murder. He surren dered to sheriff’s officers in Vancouver where a judge subsequently ruled there was not sufficient evidence to extradite him. Hazle wood was suspended by the Law Society, however, on other matters.

In March, 1982, another Vancouver lawyer, John Conroy, who had repre sented Meier in 1981, filed a petition to place Meier in bankruptcy. Conroy said Meier owed him $26,317 for his work. (Meier was fighting other lawyers at that time, too; Summa Corp., formerly Hughes Tool Co., was trying in British Columbia to

enforce a $11.9 million judgement against Meier.

Summa was also trying to get an order in Geneva, Switzerland, against Meier for the seizure of $7.1 mil lion.) Another British Columbia (8.C.) lawyer, Gordon Dowding, tried in 1981 and 1982 to prevent Meier’s extradition on the murder charge. Dowding is a for mer speaker of the B.C. legislature. He said the ex tradition attempt was a political persecution and the murder charge part of a movie scenario.

In December, 1983, Dowding was charged in Vancouver with conspiracy to subvert justice. Meier was named as an unin dicted co-conspirator.

Alan Merridew.