Falconer cleared over Dome intervention

The new Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, was cleared today of making an invalid order to wind up the Millennium Dome.

A company suing the Dome for up to £95 million damages claimed in the High Court that the newly installed head of the judiciary was not a registered shareholder of the New Millennium Experience Company when he passed the resolution for liquidation in December 2001.

The Greenwich Millennium Experience also alleged that when the liquidators, KPMG, won a High Court order to retrospectively register Lord Falconer, it had not been notified as a creditor.

Mr Justice Lawrence Collins, who today threw out GME's claims, said the company had put on an exhibition at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich in 1999 and was involved in "an obsessive campaign" against NMEC on the grounds that the Government and NMEC had conspired to ruin its business.

The judge said an order for rectification was a discretionary power and could be made retrospectively.

He agreed that GME did not have a sufficient interest in the rectification to give it a right to challenge the order.