A magistrate has ordered the Chinese government’s Food and Environmental Hygiene Department to pay costs of US $30,000 after an “over anxious” consumer lost his case against McDonald’s restaurants.
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The government department had gone to court on behalf of sales manager Lui Siu-chung, who claimed he found a small square of tissue paper in his hash brown on 19 May last year.
McDonald’s strenuously denied selling food not of the nature, substance of quality demanded by consumers, and there was a good deal of confusion concerning where exactly the paper was. Defence lawyer John McNarama argues that the paper could have been attached to the outside of the hash brown, rather than on the inside, and Lui conceded that he found that paper after having “spat out the hash brown. I have no idea if [that] was correct.”
Furthermore, Lui had phoned the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department before reporting the issue to McDonalds. Manageress of the restaurant branch in Chai Wan, Cheung Ping-ping, testified that “I picked up the hash brown to take a look. Then (Mr Lui) told me to put it down, saying I would leave my DNA on it and his DNA would not be there.”
Having been admitted then discharged from Eastern Hospital in the course of one day, after complaining of an urge to be sick and a sore throat, Lui was told he was “over anxious” on what was essentially “a trivial matter.” Lui’s request that a health inspector remove the paper for a pathology probe was also described by the court as “a waste of public money.”
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By GlobalDataThe court found that it was “difficult to say how the paper came about in the hash brown,” and McDonald’s was cleared of blame.
