Director of Public Prosecutions v Vo
[2017] VCC 1903
•11 December 2017
un
| IN THE COUNTY COURT OF VICTORIA | Revised Not Restricted Suitable for Publication |
AT MELBOURNE
CRIMINAL DIVISION
CR-17-01722
Indictment No: H11567928
| DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS |
| v |
| Thanh VO |
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JUDGE: | HIS HONOUR JUDGE TINNEY | |
WHERE HELD: | Melbourne | |
DATE OF HEARING: | 7 December 2017 | |
DATE OF SENTENCE: | 11 December 2017 | |
CASE MAY BE CITED AS: | DPP v Vo | |
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION: | [2017] VCC 1903 | |
REASONS FOR SENTENCE
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Subject: Cultivation of cannabis (Not a commercial quantity), possession of cannabis
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APPEARANCES: | Counsel | Solicitors |
| For the Crown | Ms J Ellis | Office of Public Prosecutions |
| For the Accused | Mr O Cielik | Victoria Legal Aid |
:
HIS HONOUR:
1 Thanh Vo, you have pleaded guilty to one charge of cultivation of cannabis and one charge of possession of cannabis. The maximum penalty for the cultivation offence is 15 years’ imprisonment, as this was not a commercial quantity. In some circumstances there is a lower penalty provision applicable to cultivation, but it is clearly the position that the 15 year maximum applies here. Your counsel concedes as much. There is a five year maximum term for the possession of cannabis, given the setting of this possession. Again, that is conceded.
2 You are 38 years old and have no criminal history at all.
3 You have been in custody since arrest in June.
4
This matter was opened to me last Thursday by Mr Harrison, who appeared on behalf of the Director of Public Prosecutions. A written opening, dated
9 November 2017, was marked as Exhibit A on the plea. There were also some photographs marked as part of that same exhibit. Your counsel told me that this was an agreed opening.
5 It is unnecessary in those circumstances to restate now the full factual basis of sentencing. I will not go beyond that agreed material.
6
The summary describes the nature of the crop that you were cultivating at
7 St Nicholas Court, Tarneit. You were caught pretty much red-handed as you turned into the garage in your car on 5 June of this year. The police had already entered the house, found the crop and were waiting for the return of the cultivator. There was an unmarked police car in the garage and once you operated the remote controlled door and saw that car, you then drove away from the property, but you were quickly apprehended.
7 Within the property there was a sophisticated hydroponic cannabis setup. There were 70 plants set up in two rooms. There was a bypass, though there is no charge of theft of electricity before me. There were a further four rooms at the back of the house in the process of being set up. You had all the routine equipment for this common activity. The total weight of the plants was a touch under commercial quantity by weight. It was 24.96 kilograms. In two bags, there was also some loose dry cannabis, weighing 183.5 grams, which founds Charge 2. It is not suggested that that material had come from the cultivation process, so there is no question of double punishment here.
8
Though this crop did not achieve commercial quantity, this was clearly
a professional and commercial undertaking as the summary and the photographs make clear and unlike many such crops, you were the architect and owner. You had rented these premises at $1,500 per month and they were, at the time of the cultivation, not your actual residence. By that stage, of course, it was a crop house, though it had been earlier used legitimately as a shared house. I am certainly not able to find that you have rented the premises, intent upon committing this crime, as the rental commenced back in 2015 and there is no evidence of any cultivation and indeed material suggesting otherwise from the owner, who engaged in regular inspections, including one in January.
9 However, these premises were, at the time of the police entry, dedicated to the growing of cannabis and you were cultivating the drug with the hope of financial gain.
10 These premises were, by that point in time, unmistakably what is sometimes referred to as a "grow house" or "crop house". You were no ‘mere’ "crop sitter”, you were the owner of this venture.
11 Words such as "grow house" or "crop house" and "crop sitter", well they would have meant nothing if used 25 years ago in the street or in a court. Now they are terms that are confidently used by counsel in court and understood by us judges when they are used. That says a fair bit about the prevalence of this style of offending.
12
As I have said, you were arrested near the property on 5 June of this year and you have been in custody since. Your interview with police on the day was full of admissions and was more fulsome than I am accustomed to seeing in this sort of case. I have seen a number of cultivators who, when caught on
a particular day, specify that their connection to the crop started only that day or the day before, with minimal, if any, expectation of financial reward and even sometimes a claim of lack of knowledge of any wrongdoing. It is more often than not laughable, but a court is not free to speculate in those areas. You, on the other hand, made a series of very full admissions to the police as to the crop having been set up by you, to your having expended some $10,000 doing so and of your intention to sell the cannabis for reward, owing to your financial position. You were extremely co-operative with the police.
In Mitigation
13
Mr Celik conducted an excellent plea on your behalf and he relied upon
a number of matters in mitigation. He had prepared written submissions of
a very high calibre. He said everything that could be said on your behalf. The matters raised in mitigation included:
· Your earliest of guilty pleas;
· The presence of remorse;
· The absence of any prior criminal history and given other aspects of your background, your strong and good prospects of rehabilitation;
14
Your counsel made submissions as to the level of seriousness of the offence, your reasons for being involved and the weight to be given to various purposes of sentence. He was conceding the inevitability of an immediate term of imprisonment, but reminded me that you had served time already since June. He was not suggesting that you could be immediately released from prison onto a community corrections order. He reminded me that I had at my disposal, the ability not to declare your pre-sentence detention and that
I still had then 12 months which could be used in combination. He conceded that you had to serve additional time in prison. The question was how long was required. He argued that it would be open to have you ultimately released upon a community corrections order, but failing that, to impose a head sentence with a non-parole period, recognising the many mitigatory matters.
Prosecution
15
Mr Harrison, who appeared on behalf of the Director of Public Prosecutions of this State last week, made submissions as to the seriousness of the cultivation here. The Director took the view that it would be open to pass
a combination-type sentence, or failing that, to impose a head sentence and fix a non-parole period. I do not ignore the submissions made by any party appearing before me, however, I am not bound by submissions made as to penalty or range. I have to reach my own view on these matters. I am, after all, the person exercising the sentencing discretion.
Background
I turn now to your background and I do so only briefly. Why briefly? Well,
I have no reason to doubt what I was told of your personal and family background and l am not going to restate it all now. It is set out in quite some detail in the excellent written plea submissions of your counsel, Exhibit 1, as well as in the report of Mr Simmons, which is Exhibit 2.
Briefly stated, you are 38 years old, born in July 1979 in Vietnam. You are the youngest of six children and you were raised in rural Vietnam. It was not
a prosperous existence. Your father died way too young, in his early 50s,
I believe, when you were only 13 and your mother migrated to the United States of America when you were only 16. Your various other siblings had emigrated, or were later to emigrate, either to the United States or to Australia. You were, from the age of 16, raised by your oldest sister, as the other siblings had mostly, by then, migrated to those other countries.
You left school in Year 11, but went back some time later and did the equivalent of Year 12 at night school. You did further tertiary studies in Information Technology and you were employed in a range of industries, including, at one point, as a nail technician.
You came to Australia in 2007, sponsored by your first wife and you became
a citizen in 2012.
You have been married twice. That first marriage failed and one of the reasons it did was the financial strains associated with attempting to bail out your sister from financial difficulties. An account was given of your having debts arising, in part, from that bail out, which had motivated this crime. Your elder sister had incurred some debts. Exhibit 4 is a bundle of documents, speaking of those five debts. I am not going to descend to the ins and outs of the documents. I accept the material as disclosing that your sister had debts well prior to 2017. Now their scale, at least in western terms, was not too dire, but no doubt viewed through the eyes of a local in her homeland, Vietnam, they were large indeed. You tried to bail her out and to do so, you obtained a loan or loans yourself. You were then carrying the debt yourself. Again, there are some documents in Exhibit 3, detailing debts that you owed. Again, they were not massive debts, hovering between $15,000 and $20,000.
You had also developed a gambling habit and it was submitted that turning to this style of crime seemed a way out for you. As I have said, you have no prior criminal history at all. You have been in custody since June and you have been using your time wisely in custody. You have regular contact with your wife.
Guilty plea
I turn then to the matters raised in mitigation. You have pleaded guilty and at the earliest stage. I reward you for your guilty plea and the stage at which that plea was entered. You have facilitated the course of justice. You have owned up to your crime and taken responsibility for it and at the earliest stage. Witnesses have been spared the experience of coming to court. The community has been saved the time, cost and effort associated with a contested hearing, either in this court or in the court below. I take those matters into account in your favour. They are clearly mitigatory. In addition, even before you had entered that early guilty plea, you had made very full admissions indeed in a co-operative stance in the police interview. That is also mitigatory. However, I am afraid it also spells out the seriousness of your crime of cultivation.
Remorse
23 Your counsel argues that you are remorseful. I do not doubt that in your case. A guilty plea is often indicative of some remorse. Your guilty plea was entered at the earliest opportunity. I have your attitude with the police and also some references to your feelings about your involvement in the crime in the report of Mr Simmons.
24 I am prepared to find that you do have some remorse and I take it into account in mitigation.
Rehabilitation
25 As to your rehabilitation, your counsel argues that you have strong and good prospects. You have no criminal history at all. You have studied and then worked for many years. You have family support. You have none of the conditions which so often would impede rehabilitation, for instance, drug addiction or serious and complex mental health problems.
26
You have made the terrible decision to commit this serious crime, but in
a setting where the debt is said to be a strong driver for your activity. You have been arrested, charged and brought before the courts. You pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity and you do exhibit some remorse. You have been in prison for quite some time already and that will continue once sentenced today. Maybe you had not really thought through too deeply as to how seriously this offending would be viewed and the potential consequences if caught. You have developed some insight. Many of these features will have a role in deterring you into the future. I believe that you do have good or strong prospects of rehabilitation and a low risk of offending in this way again.
General remarks
27
I address now some general remarks to you. Unlike so many cases which come before the court, you sit at the top of the tree, in terms of this crop. What do
I mean by that? It was yours. It is that simple. You had set it up. You had financed it, incurring significant costs to do so, both in terms of cost of rental and equipment and chemicals. You are the person entirely responsible for this crop and you were to benefit financially from it.
28
You were not some lowly crop sitter. Your involvement was driven by the lure of easy and illegal financial gain and the extent to which you incurred costs, has caused me to entertain at least some doubt over your explanations as to debt being the only driver for this crime. You had used significant amounts of money and effort to set up this crop house. I am told that you borrowed much of that and went further into debt. By that stage, you were not dealing with your sister’s predicament. You had assumed her debts. You were also gambling, though
I am not able to find that you were addicted to gambling. There is no evidence suggesting that. You may well have been a problem gambler. Well we could probably set up a net outside any entrance to Crown Casino, or any number of pokies venues and catch a variety of problem gamblers going in and out of such venues. They do not all turn to crime.
29 As I have said already, it is not open to me to find that you have originally rented these premises with cultivation in mind, nor can I deal with you for some more extended crime than that which is charged. The cultivation is laid on the basis of your arrest date, but I cannot ignore your admissions to having set up the crop and having been cultivating for some three weeks. I am certainly not free to find any earlier cultivations of different crops. The suggestion is that initially, you were running the house as a form of rooming house, subletting various rooms and making money in that way. You were only living there for three months and thereafter, you had tenants. They left unexpectedly in November and December 2016. You were paying $1,500 per month rent, but had commenced with the lease in March 2015, with a payment of $3,000 cash. As at the date of arrest, you were committing this serious crime with the expectation of financial reward. You were the only person standing to benefit.
30
Financial gain is a very common motivation for people engaged at any level in this sort of venture. Was it need or was it greed? It is often a very fine line and I suppose sometimes it can be a bit of each. It is hard for me to know, as your accounts as to involvement are found in your dealings or discussions with
Mr Simmons and in the police interview. These are totally untested and as
I have said a moment ago, concern as to debt does not seem to make much sense, given the scale of expense to get the crop up and running. You had the money to pay rent. You were only working on an irregular basis.
31 Incurring further debt and expense to pay a debt, is a bit hard to fathom. I do, though, have the material in Exhibits 3 and 4. I am prepared to find that you had assisted your sister and had yourself fallen into debt, that you also had some issues with gambling. I believe it is open for me to conclude that the debt, in part, motivated you and that, to a small extent, reduces your moral culpability.
32 The fact is, not every person wanting or needing money embarks upon serious criminal conduct. You did. You chose to. You should not have. That is obvious. You were not being pressured by others to take these steps. There may have been some pressures in your life. Not many people live without some financial pressure. You committed serious crime, in part, to deal or try to deal with some debts.
33 There is no material before me suggesting any lavish lifestyle. You may have been slightly vulnerable to making poor decisions, owing to your financial position. There was no physical duress and you know you made a terrible decision.
34 You were doing what virtually every person engaged in such activities does. You were taking a calculated risk. You made a choice, that is what it was, to commit this serious crime. You hoped not to be caught. You surely weighed up the risks. You knew there were risks, including the risk of arrest. You told the police that you had your sister-in-law bring her children to the house to make it seem lived in.
35
I have to take into account the nature and the gravity of the offence. Even
crop-sitters who are marginally connected to crops, commit serious crimes, in the way they enable cultivations to occur. You were no crop sitter. You were the owner.
36 As I have said in other cases, I say now in yours, this crop and its ultimate success, well it has been interrupted by the execution of the warrant by the police. You clearly knew that you were embarking upon a serious crime. I am satisfied of that beyond reasonable doubt. This was, very obviously, an elaborate, organised criminal activity. Your hope of profit was central to the event. Profit to you, not profit to be derived by someone above you in the hierarchy. There was no one above you. You were the only principal.
37 You hoped to grow a crop to maturity to harvest and then to sell, to find a market to make a large illegal profit. You are not charged with trafficking, but this cultivation is unmistakeably commercial, as your counsel concedes on your behalf.
38 There is no valuation statement in this case as to the worth of the crop. I do not need one. The court does not need a valuation statement to appreciate the inherent value of this drug. It is why you were incurring the costs and taking the risks in growing it. This was an unmistakeably commercial venture. It happened not to reach a commercial quantity, by the barest of margins.
39 I am required to manifest this court’s denunciation of your criminal conduct and I do. I must also punish you. I am required to seek to deter or dissuade you and others from committing this sort of offence.
40 This crime carries a maximum term of 15 years’ imprisonment. Whilst I am entitled to have regard to some matters of principle referred to in cases dealing with commercial quantity cultivations and I do, I must never lose sight of the fact that this is a non-commercial quantity, therefore it has the lower maximum penalty.
41 Still it seems to me that it is for a variety of reasons, more serious than very many examples of commercial quantity cultivation that have come before me. For instance, a case of a recently engaged and poorly paid, desperate crop sitter, with no share in profits. I must pay regard to the maximum penalty. The Court of Appeal of this State has spoken often enough of the prevalence of cultivation of cannabis and the inherent seriousness of such commercial quantity transactions. The principles apply equally to non-commercial cultivations of this ilk. You were not tinkering around with a couple of plants in your backyard. It was a full-blown commercial venture, as high up in terms of non-commercial quantity as could be achieved.
42
Hydroponic cultivation 25 years ago was something of a rarity. This sort of cultivation is now very common indeed. You have chosen to cultivate
a non-commercial quantity of cannabis. It is a serious crime and you knew it.
I have no doubt about that at all.
43 Sentencing always involves the balancing of a number of purposes or principles. I have already mentioned some of them. I have to take into account also your prospects of rehabilitation. As I have said, I think they are good.
44 I must consider the need for specific deterrence, that is, deterring you from committing crimes in the future. You have been arrested, you have been charged, you have pleaded guilty, you have remorse, you have no criminal record and you have already been in custody for quite some time and for the first time.
45 I accept your counsel’s submissions that specific deterrence has already been achieved, to a degree. Whilst I still plainly must give it some weight, I believe it is open to reduce the weight to be given to specific deterrence, as well as to community protection in this case. I can hardly assign enormous weight to such purposes, whilst at the same time, making such favourable findings as I do as to your future prospects and the low risk that you pose in the future. These purposes can be moderated, to a degree.
46 General deterrence is a different proposition. It is a very significant purpose of sentencing in a case such as this.
47 Those who choose to engage in this activity, at whatever level, are virtually always taking a calculated risk. It is a risk that is taken on because of the hope of financial reward, as it most clearly was in your case. Well, people must understand that with that potential reward comes a significant and a real risk of detection, of prosecution and then the likelihood of the imposition of a significant term of imprisonment to serve.
48 This court must send a message loud and clear to others in the community who might be minded to commit this sort of serious offence. There are evidently plenty that are so minded. This is a prevalent crime. General deterrence is, in my judgment, a very significant purpose of sentencing in this case.
49 I have scarcely mentioned the possession charge and that is because it is so clearly far less serious than the cultivation. That cannabis it is not a product of any cultivation. You are not a user of drugs and I was told that you had been provided that cannabis in the bags to give you some idea of the product that you had to harvest.
Current sentencing practice
50 I pay regard to current sentencing practices, as I am required to. I have looked at the Sentencing Snapshot 196 of 2016. Non-commercial quantity cultivation is not that common a charge up in this jurisdiction. I have looked also at the repository of material held at the Judicial College of Victoria sentencing site, which includes an overview of non-commercial cultivation sentences in the Court of Appeal. I have also looked at the single case that I was taken to of Quaresima [2017] VSCA 306, however, there are many differences in every direction. One is that that was not an exclusive crop house. Nor is there any single correct sentence in a case. The Court of Appeal in that case was not convinced that the sentence imposed was manifestly excessive. I am hardly surprised. It says virtually nothing as to the appropriate sentence in this case.
51 As to the statistics, they show that when prison was selected as a disposition and it often was not, the most common sentence fell between one and two years.
52
Well, there are inherent limitations in making any judgment based on statistical material. There are also real limitations in looking at other cases. No other case is any authority as to the sentence called for in this case. I am not required to sentence in accordance with a median or any other statistical measure.
I have to sentence you for your crimes. Your offending was very serious. General deterrence is and must be at the forefront of any sentence imposed by the court.
53 I do not accept your counsel’s submissions that your offending was mid-level. Your offending falls comfortably towards the higher end of offence seriousness, owing to your role, the set up and the weight of the crop. It is pretty much at the highest end of non-commercial weight. You were the only person who had set up the crop and stood to gain personally from this venture. It was your venture. It was a very serious example of this offence, though as I have found, there is some modest reduction in culpability, I believe, owing to the debt. Nor can I forget that you have no prior appearances at all and that you have good prospects.
54
I have seen commercial quantity crops achieved by a plant number alone with 100 plants so small that the total weight was under two or three kilograms.
I have seen crops with very few plants, weighing in just above 25 kilograms, so just above the commercial quantity threshold. Within the last year or two, I, as only one of very many judges sitting in this court, have seen commercial quantity crops in an open air setting, with very low prospects indeed of any meaningful yield at all. No hydroponics, no great set-up, no infrastructure, no hallmarks of commerciality at all. I have seen crops grown in very amateurish conditions; in sheds, in garages, in makeshift settings with very basic equipment indeed. I have dealt with cultivation of commercial quantity crops that have not even been associated with any commerciality at all, with the court finding as to the crop being grown predominantly for personal use down the track, there being no reward or expectation of any financial reward.
55 Well in your case, there were 70 plants. They weighed a touch under the commercial quantity threshold. The house which you had rented was clearly set up as a professional undertaking. The photographs make that very plain.
56 Now, the arrest interrupted the crop and your cultivation of it, but it was clearly a viable concern. It was a dedicated crop house with two rooms under cultivation and others in the process of being set up and you were the sole cultivator. You were the owner. You were the principal.
57
I have taken into account all of the submissions that have been made on your behalf, including the various exhibits, including the report of Mr Simmons.
I have not seen the need to descend to the detail of that report, but I have taken it into account, including the reference to the details of your background and your feelings for having committed the crime. Your counsel made plain that there are no Verdins considerations pressed in this case and he was right. The report is as much relied upon as demonstrating the absence of anti-social personality features or serious illnesses which may impede your rehabilitation. Mr Simmons thinks you have quite good prospects of rehabilitation. I believe they are good.
Combination Disposition
58 Your counsel referred to the case of Boulton and suggested that it was open to impose a combination-type order here. It is obvious enough that not every offender for every crime can or should be admitted to such an order. There are some crimes where the purposes of sentencing cannot be given adequate weight by use of a community corrections order, even one imposed in combination with a prison term.
59 It is no part of my job as a judge to use ploys or contrivances to keep open the community corrections order disposition. The Court of Appeal contends that this has happened often enough in the past and has led to undue compression of sentences in some cases (see Basic). It is no part of my job as a judge to jump ahead and to select an outcome with some advantages and then somehow try to work my way to that outcome. What I have to do, is to pass an appropriate sentence.
60
One thing remains constant in this case and indeed in every other case. Locking someone up is a matter of last resort for any court. Section 5(4C) of the Sentencing Act prohibits the imposition of a sentence of confinement, unless the court concludes that the purposes of sentence cannot be achieved by
a suitably conditioned community corrections order.
61 It is accepted by your counsel that a community corrections order, on its own, simply cannot meet all the needs of sentencing, that a term of imprisonment is obviously required and I agree. Mr Celik argued that I should impose a prison term requiring further time in custody and provide for your release in due course on a community corrections order.
62 I do not believe that such a disposition is open to me. Such a disposition would not achieve all the purposes of sentencing, including the need to punish, to denounce and to deter. General deterrence is a powerful factor in this sort of case. One can almost always see some advantages in a community corrections order, including that unlike the fixing of a non-parole period, release from prison onto a community corrections order offers a guaranteed release mechanism. But I am not going to fix upon prison and release on a community corrections order as the end disposition and then somehow plot a course to reach such an outcome and engage in ploys and contrivances to maintain the availability of that order. It is, in my view, simply not available, owing to the nature of your crimes and my need to impose adequate and appropriate sentences of imprisonment. It would not achieve the purposes of sentencing, in my view.
Disposal
63 Now, Mr Vo, application was made for a disposal order. That related to the cannabis plants and the dried cannabis. Your counsel consented to the making of that order and I have made and signed that order. I order, pursuant to the provisions of the Confiscation Act, the forfeiture to the State of the property referred to in the schedule and I direct that it be handled in the manner spelt out in this particular order that I have signed. So I have signed that order.
464ZF
64 In addition, there is an application for a forensic sample. That application is not opposed and I am going to make that order, owing to the seriousness of the offence, the fact that you consent to it and that I believe it is in the public interest. Pursuant to the provisions of 464ZF of the Crimes Act, I order that you undergo a forensic procedure for the taking of a scraping from your mouth, until a sample of sufficient standard is obtained and this is for placement on the database.
65 Now, you do consent to this order, but I still have to tell you that the authorities can use reasonable force to take that sample. It is a pretty straightforward thing. You will just be asked by the authorities to have a swab run around the inside of your mouth and that is what I have authorised at this stage. No doubt, if they encountered any difficulties, the authorities would apply for a blood sample, which, to this point, I have not authorised. Anyway, I have signed those orders as well.
66 Mr Vo, I wonder if you would just stand up then please and I will pass sentence upon you.
Sentence
67
On the charge of cultivation of cannabis, that is Charge 1 on the indictment,
I convict and sentence you to two years' imprisonment. That is the base sentence.
68 On the possession charge, which is Charge 2, you are convicted and sentenced to one months' imprisonment. That will be served concurrently with the base sentence.
Total effective sentence
69 It follows then that the total effective sentence is 24 months, or two years.
Non-parole period
70 I fix a non-parole period of 14 months.
Section 18 pre-sentence detention
71 You have already served 189 days of this sentence, by way of pre-sentence detention and that declaration is to be entered in the records of the court. So you have already served that time, in other words.
Section 6AAA
72 I have taken into account your guilty plea. If you had pleaded not guilty and been found guilty of these offences by a jury, I would have convicted and sentenced you to four years' imprisonment. I would have fixed a non-parole period of two and a half years. That statement is to be entered in the records of the court as well.
73 Just have a seat then for a moment and I will see if there is anything I have overlooked.
74 Ms Ellis, are there any other matters I need to deal with at all, or not?
75 MS ELLIS: No, Your Honour, nothing outstanding.
76 HIS HONOUR: No. Mr Celik, any other matters that I need to deal with?
77 MR CELIK: No, Your Honour.
78 HIS HONOUR: Your client has been in custody, so I do not see there is any particular need for me to make any sort of custody management directions.
79 MR CELIK: No, none that I'm aware of, Your Honour.
80 HIS HONOUR: All right. Look, I will sign that formal order then.
81 I have signed that formal order then, so, yes, that completes that matter. You will go down and see your client downstairs, will you?
82 MR CELIK: I will, Your Honour, yes.
83 HIS HONOUR: Yes, all right. All right, well, Mr Vo, Mr Celik will be downstairs to see you in the cells, all right? Yes, all right, well that completes the matter then, so if Mr Vo can be removed, thank you.
84 MS ELLIS: As Your Honour pleases.
85 MR CELIK: As Your Honour pleases.
86 HIS HONOUR: Yes, thanks for making yourself available, Madam Interpreter. Yes, 9.45 tomorrow, please.
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