The View | What the reaction to the Patrick Ho case says about China’s global ambitions
Comments questioning the case brought by the US against Hong Kong’s former home affairs secretary are disturbing, says Stephen Vines
The recent arrest in New York of Hong Kong’s former home affairs secretary Patrick Ho Chi-ping on bribery charges is spectacular in itself, but the response to the arrest is something else – it is highly disturbing.
Ho and the former foreign minister of Senegal, Cheikh Gadio, are accused of bribing Chad’s president and Uganda’s foreign minister to the tune of US$2.9 million on behalf of a subsidiary of the Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC.
All parties involved in these allegations deny the charges and, as the case has yet to come to trial, it is unwise to speculate on its outcome. However the very fact that the charges have been brought has angered a number of people who are stout defenders of the Chinese government.
A commentary in the Hong Kong-based Beijing mouthpiece Wen Wei Po said that the arrests “give rise to the question: was the US action genuinely intended to safeguard fairness and justice or merely a move to head off a perceived threat to its hegemony?”
The same line of reasoning is also to be found in a report from Beijing’s Global Times, which quotes an anonymous CEFC official as saying there were “deep international political motives” behind the case.
Meanwhile an official statement from CEFC said it was “highly concerned” about the arrest, but stressed it had no “commercial relations of authorisation” with the China Energy Fund Committee. This is despite the fact that CEFC is responsible for 100 per cent of the committee’s funding; Ho was the fund’s secretary general.