Businessman jailed for biggest child porn haul

A married businessman was jailed for 16 months yesterday after being caught with the city's largest haul to date of child pornography.

Deputy District Court Judge Henry Mierczak described it as 'a bad case' when sentencing the chairman of the New Territories Commercial and Industrial General Association, Sailing Lau Ying-sau.

Lau, 48, who pleaded guilty to the offence on January 25, admitted possessing 27,260 digital images and 470 video clips of child pornography he downloaded from the internet onto two desktop computers and three external hard discs.

The illegal material, which Lau said he had collected over the past three years, was seized when police raided his Tai Po home on May 10 last year.

Two psychiatric and psychological reports revealed Lau was not suffering from any mental or psychological conditions that required counselling or treatment.

Barrister Gordon Wong, for the defence, yesterday told the judge 'Lau was not of a wicked nature' and had committed the offence out of ignorance of the law and failure to recognise the consequences.

But Judge Mierczak said the offence was serious and the huge amount of child pornography involved called for an immediate custodial sentence. He accepted the files were kept for Lau's self-gratification and there was no evidence to suggest any distribution or production, or that the files had been used for commercial purposes.

He said, however, that Lau had brought shame to his family by having committed the offence.

In mitigation Mr Wong had said Lau, the chairman of a trade group, was popular in the business world as he was a 'charitable person' and 'honest businessman'.

Apart from running a food and catering business, Lau was a responsible and loving father of a daughter and a son, both now at university. Lau married when he was 25 and his wife was very supportive of her husband, even after the offence was exposed

Senior government counsel Hayson Tse Ka-sze had told the court officers of the Commercial Crime Bureau, acting on intelligence, searched Lau's home in San Wan On Lane last May. The computers and hard disks were found in Lau's work room.

He told the court the seized materials included a few depicting sadism and bestiality, but most were classified as 'category one' - which the prosecution defined as the least serious on a list of one to five.

When arrested, Lau denied distributing or sharing the pornographic files. He also said the files were compressed and he used software called 'SP Program' to reconstruct them, adding that he sometimes needed to key in a password which he looked up from the internet to open the files.