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Furnetics Unlimited Ltd. today issues the following statement in respect of a Halloween observance held on the evening of Saturday, the twenty-ninth of October, at a ger-camp resort within Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, at which two adult individuals privately known to the corporation as commercial clients of the Phenotype Renovations™ service line were in attendance in the course of a private personal excursion, and at which, and in the neighbouring valleys over the following days, their attendance was the occasion of considerable alarm — to fellow guests of the resort, to its staff, and to residents of the sums through which the two clients afterwards passed. The corporation records its sincere regret to each of them, and to the administration of the park, for a disturbance that ought not to have taken place and that will not be permitted to recur in a form for which the corporation may reasonably be held answerable.

The corporation had, over the preceding forty-eight hours, been in receipt of enquiries from members of the Mongolian and international press, from the park administration, from the governors of two of the affected sums, and from a small number of the resort's own guests, seeking clarification on a range of accounts of the evening in question. The present statement is issued in response, and is intended to be read as the corporation's full and considered comment. Further enquiries will be received courteously by the Office of the General Counsel and will be answered only where an answer is both possible and proper; the corporation asks in advance for the patience of any enquirer whose particular question falls outside those two conditions.

The service line, in brief

Because the present matter is the occasion, for many readers, of a first encounter with the Phenotype Renovations™ service line, a brief description of the line is set out here in the plainest terms the corporation is able to offer. Phenotype Renovations™ is a medical service, offered to adult private clients of the corporation on standard commercial terms since the summer of 2004, by which the client's own body is, over a course of care extending typically to eighteen months, remade to a template of the client's choosing under the direct clinical supervision of the corporation and, since 2014, under the standing oversight of the corporation's Independent Ethics Board. A Phenotype Renovations™ client is, at the beginning of the course of care, an adult human patient in full civil capacity, having elected the course of care of his or her own free will, and having satisfied a substantial course of medical, psychological, and legal screening as a condition of admission to the line. A Phenotype Renovations™ client is, at the end of the course of care, the same adult human patient in the same full civil capacity, in structured medical follow-up with the corporation, and living such a private life as he or she chooses. That is the whole of the matter and the corporation has no wish to have it otherwise represented.

The Morphic Series of commercial templates — four in number at the present writing — draws on a comparative anatomical foundation built up by the Hephaestus Group over the whole of the corporation's history and is the technical basis on which the four templates have been offered to the public since the current architecture of the service line was completed in November of last year. The two individuals whose attendance at Gorkhi-Terelj is the subject of this statement are commercial clients of the line and completed their respective courses of care under the current architecture; the corporation has been asked to state whether either or both of the two are clients of a specific template and does not propose to answer that question either now or hereafter.

“A Phenotype Renovations client is an adult human patient in structured clinical follow-up. That is the clinical fact and it is the only clinical fact the corporation asks members of the public to hold in mind. Everything else — the appearance of the person, the carriage of the person, the presence of the person in any given place on any given evening — is a private matter, belonging to the person and not to the service line. We ask, respectfully, that it be treated so.”

— Dr. Kenji Arai, Head of Reconstructive Practice

The identity of the two clients

The corporation does not, as a matter of standing confidentiality practice, identify its clients, and will not identify the two clients concerned. Their names, their places of ordinary residence, the dates of their admission to the service line, the identity of their attending physicians, the templates under which their courses of care were undertaken, and any particulars of the courses of care themselves, are and will remain confidential. Enquiries directed at establishing any of these particulars will be acknowledged, if a return address is provided, and will not be answered. The corporation asks the Mongolian and international press, in the most courteous terms it is able to command, to refrain from the pursuit of the two clients, of their families, and of any person acquainted with them, and to publish no photographic or video material of either of them, whether taken on the evening of the twenty-ninth or subsequently. It is the corporation's firm intention to defend the two clients' confidentiality, by the ordinary means available to it in law, to the full extent that they wish it defended.

The corporation notes, with regret, that a small number of the accounts carried in the days since the evening of the twenty-ninth have reached, in describing the appearance of the two clients, for the vocabulary of the chono and for older material still. The corporation does not comment on the imaginative traditions of Mongolia, which are not the corporation's to comment on, and does not wish to be understood as doing so. It observes, in the plainest terms it can, that the two individuals in question are, in medical fact and in civil status, adult human clients of a medical service line, and that the ordinary courtesies owing to any two such persons in the country of their private travel are the courtesies the corporation asks the reader, on their behalf, to extend.

The character of the excursion

The two clients were, on the weekend in question, on private personal travel within Mongolia and were not on any business of the corporation. Their decision to attend the Halloween observance at the resort, in whatever dress they judged suitable, was their own; they had neither consulted the corporation as to the wisdom of the attendance nor sought the corporation's leave to attend, and the corporation neither directs nor sanctions the off-campus conduct of its patient-clients, nor would it undertake to do so. A Phenotype Renovations™ client retains, at the close of the course of care, the full ordinary civil capacity of an adult human being, including the capacity to make a private personal decision the corporation would not itself have counselled. The corporation does not resile from that plain statement of the client's autonomy. It observes, only, that the private personal decision made on the evening of the twenty-ninth was not the decision the corporation would have counselled, and that its counsel, had it been sought, would have been to the opposite effect.

The two clients were, at the corporation's expense, quietly withdrawn from the vicinity of the park in the small hours of the thirtieth, at their own request; they are at present in the corporation's care and are, so far as the corporation is able to say, unharmed. The corporation asks that they be permitted, on the return of ordinary quiet to the matter, to resume the private life to which every client of the corporation is unconditionally entitled.

What follows locally

The corporation has, in the days since the evening of the twenty-ninth, undertaken and will complete the following measures. None of them is offered by way of confession of a liability the corporation acknowledges; each is offered by way of practical repair to the disturbance that has, in fact, been occasioned.

• Meeting with the park administration. The corporation's Chief Operating Officer will call on the administration of Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, in Ulaanbaatar, in the week beginning the fourteenth of November, to convey the corporation's regret in person and to discuss such practical measures as the administration may find useful.
• Meetings with the affected sum governors. A small delegation from the Office of the General Counsel and from the Ulaanbaatar clinical staff will call on the governors of the two sums to which enquiries have principally been addressed, at times and in a manner of the governors' choosing.
• A defined donation to park services. A donation, in an amount and to a purpose to be agreed with the park administration, will be made to the park's ranger and visitor-services funds. The donation is at the disposal of the administration and is not conditional on the terms of any settlement between the corporation and any private party.
• A voluntary public-appearance advisory for clients. A short written advisory, drafted over the past ten days by the Office of the General Counsel in consultation with the clinical team, is being made available on request, without charge, to every past and future Phenotype Renovations™ client of the corporation. The advisory addresses the practical considerations attending public appearance in dress or in company that a member of the general public may find striking. It is not, and will not be made, mandatory.
• A community-liaison contact. A named contact within the Office of the General Counsel, reachable in Mongolian, Russian, and English, is being made available to the park administration, to the affected sum governors, and to the resort management, for the balance of the calendar year and thereafter as may be required.

None of the measures above affects the availability, safety register, or client-facing terms of the Phenotype Renovations™ service line, and none has been the subject of any communication between the corporation and the Ministry of Health beyond a courtesy notification made on the second of November. The Independent Ethics Board has been notified of the matter within the ordinary term of its charter and has recorded no exceptional finding; the notification will appear in the Board's fourth-quarter minute in the ordinary course.

“We came to Mongolia because we were welcomed here, and we have taken great care, in the six years since, to remain worthy of that welcome. What occurred at Gorkhi-Terelj on the evening of the twenty-ninth is not, in the corporation's view, what welcome looks like, in either direction. We are sorry to those who were frightened. We are, at the same time, quietly and without publication, having a rather firmer conversation with the two clients whose evening this was, on the question of how much thought a person owes to the country he or she is a guest of, and to the neighbours of the resort at which he or she has chosen to spend a weekend.”

— Nomin Batbayar, Chief Operating Officer

On the corporation's standing in Mongolia

Furnetics has, since the opening of the Ulaanbaatar interim laboratory in September of 2010 and of the Sükhbaatar Square campus in October of 2013, operated in Mongolia under a settled understanding with the Ministry of Health and with the country's medical, academic, and administrative institutions. The corporation regards that understanding as the ordinary condition of its work, and does not take it for granted. The events of the twenty-ninth are the first in the corporation's six years in Mongolia at which the corporation has been the occasion of public disturbance to its neighbours; the corporation intends that they shall also be the last. It offers no undertaking beyond the plain one that it will take such measures, over the coming months, as are within its power to make good.

Enquiries from the Mongolian and international press may be directed to the Office of the General Counsel, 15 Sükhbaatar Square, Ulaanbaatar. Enquiries from the park administration, the affected sum governors, and the resort management should reach the named community-liaison contact by the ordinary channel; enquiries from clients or prospective clients of the Phenotype Renovations™ service line will be routed, without further comment, to their usual case correspondent.

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