Jake's View | Conviction endangers respect for the law
Money-laundering case is a miscarriage of justice when the mere fact of looking like you are committing a crime is enough to get you put in jail
A public housing tenant who laundered more than HK$6.7 billion through nine Hong Kong banks over almost four years was jailed for 10 years yesterday.
Take note of what this ridiculous law actually says. It is a crime to handle money in a way that looks to others as if you are laundering it, whether or not you are actually doing so and whoever these others may be.
The law says you can be sent to jail for 14 years if you deal with money "known or believed to represent the proceeds of an indictable offence". It doesn't require that an indictable offence be proved. It doesn't even require that one be indicated. None was in this latest miscarriage of justice.
The law only requires that reasonable grounds exist to believe that there had been one, whatever it might be and whether anyone in authority even knows what it was. Our courts have accepted that this criterion is met if money is handled in a way that looks surreptitious.
Now I know you may consider this a pretty good reason to think crime involved. Why handle money surreptitiously if you don't need to do so? Why spend your whole working day opening bank accounts and transferring small amounts of money in and out of them unless you have something to hide?