A consultant who alleges she was asked to resign after speaking out against the government in last year's television licensing row says she will sue her former company for more than HK$10 million she says she is owed.
Jenny Ng Pui-ying, former managing partner at Value Partners, said that after the company announced she had resigned "voluntarily" it had issued a dismissal letter to avoid paying out money due to her.
In an interview with the Economic Journal, she accused the consulting firm - engaged by the government to report on the issuing of new free-to-air television licences - of "tackling" her with "an unusual action".
She told the Chinese-language newspaper that she decided to resign and her resignation was accepted before reports emerged she had been pressed to quit after the company's Italian founder, Giorgio Rossi Cairo, received a complaint accusing her of breaching confidentiality.
The complaint came after Ng came out in December to say that the government had used a report from her consultancy as a shield against criticism of its decision not to grant a free-to-air television licence to Hong Kong Television Network. She said it had quoted "a few paragraphs" from a 400-page report "out of context" in seeking to justify the awarding of licences only to applicants backed by pay-television players Now TV and Cable TV.
Value Partners said on February 5 that Ng had quit "voluntarily" in a letter dated January 22.