The father and son who ran Moulin Global Eyecare, the Hong Kong-based optics empire that collapsed in 2005, owing creditors HK$2.7 billion, will be tried on fraud charges in September.
Ma Bo-kee, the rags to riches entrepreneur who started Moulin in a Kowloon workshop, and his son Cary Ma Lit-kin, who aggressively grew the firm into what he claimed was the world's third-biggest eyewear business, will be joined by eight other defendants in a 100-day High Court hearing beginning on September 14.
Moulin's speedy and spectacular failure in June 2005, which was triggered by the company's bank lenders accusing it of false accounting, stunned Hong Kong investors.
Six months earlier, chief executive Cary Ma had presided over his firm's mega-buyout of 378-store United States retail chain Eye Care Centers of America, which helped Moulin's market capitalisation balloon to HK$2.08 billion.
The details of the criminal prosecution's case against the Mas and the other defendants, who include Moulin's former treasurer Lam Yuk-wah, former financial controller Tang Yiu-leung and other company executives, will not emerge until the case goes to a pretrial hearing in April.
Moulin's liquidator, Ferrier Hodgson, which is trying to recover cash for creditors through the civil courts, has accused the failed eyewear firm of vastly inflating its revenues by creating phantom customers.
The liquidators discovered one of Moulin's supposedly largest customers was in fact a Chinese restaurant in McCook, a small town in the US state of Nebraska, according to people who attended lenders' meetings.