Former TVB manager Stephen Chan and assistant face guilty verdicts in bribery charge over HK$112,000 TV show payment

Former TVB general manager Stephen Chan Chi-wan and his former assistant were yesterday ordered to be found guilty of bribery following the Department of Justice's successful bid to overturn the pair's earlier acquittal.

Chan, 55, and Edthancy Tseng Pei-kun, 33, have twice been cleared of three graft charges after a District Court judge accepted Chan's argument he did not need to declare receipt of payment for outside work to his employer. But last month the Department of Justice filed a second appeal.

Handing down the ruling, Court of Appeal vice-president Mr Justice Wally Yeung Chun-kuen said the last decision - which came after the department won the first appeal in having the case be remitted to the District Court - "had neither legal nor factual basis".

He ordered the lower court to convict and sentence the pair on one count of agents conspiring to accept advantages. This case centres on an episode of Chan's talk show Be My Guest, which took place at Olympian City in Tai Kok Tsui on New Year's Eve 2009.

Despite the show being produced and broadcast by TVB, the mall paid Chan HK$112,000 through a company run by Tseng.

Yeung wrote in his judgment that trial judge Mr Justice Poon Siu-tung had erred in ruling that since TVB had granted Chan permission to take up outside jobs numerous times, he would have been given the green light had he applied in this case.