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Chief executive election 2017
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Chief executive-elect Carrie Lam in Whampoa a day after her victory in the city's leadership race. Photo: Sam Tsang

Hong Kong chief executive election was ‘a farce’, aide to Regina Ip claims

Government’s former information chief also says ‘clandestine meetings’ took place in Shenzhen involving Beijing officials, liaison office staff and voters

Hong Kong’s chief executive election is “a farce”, according to a key member of failed candidate Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee’s campaign team who slammed what he called active meddling by Beijing’s liaison office in a poll that violated the “one country, two systems” principle.
The strongly worded opinion piece– penned by Mark Pinkstone, the government’s former chief information officer – was the clearest suggestion to date that Ip’s team believed Beijing interfered in last month’s election, which Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor won with 777 votes.

Pinkstone, who has known Lam for many years from his civil service career, remained confident she would do well in her new post, but he claimed the former chief secretary would need “strong support to mend fences between the legislature and the public”.

Ip, the New People’s Party chairwoman who was forced to drop out of the race because of insufficient nominations, said she had read Pinkstone’s piece but had “no comment”.

In the piece, Pinkstone accused the liaison office or its associates of making phone calls to all 1,194 members of the Election Committee responsible for picking the city’s leader. He said the calls urged support for Lam, backed by Beijing, and asked them not to nominate Ip.

The biggest threat to Lam was Ip because of her experience and thorough manifesto
Mark Pinkstone, former chief information officer

“The biggest threat to Lam was Ip because of her experience and thorough manifesto, so she was the obvious choice to be thrown under the bus,” he said.

The chief information officer for Ip’s campaign also claimed “clandestine meetings” were held in Shenzhen involving Beijing officials, members of the liaison office, and voters, convening almost every weekend prior to the election.

“This is insider information. During the campaign I met many electors [and] many of them had spoken of the phone calls made to their friends,” Pinkstone wrote in an email reply to the Post’s enquiries. “No one is prepared to name names.”

He described the election as a farce and accused Beijing of deciding as early as the middle of last year to anoint Lam as the city’s new chief executive to succeed incumbent leader Leung Chun-ying.
Pinkstone said he viewed what the liaison office did during the election process as a clear violation of Article 22 of the Basic Law, which has stipulated that no department of the central government may interfere in the city’s internal affairs.

When asked what should be done to ensure the poll’s fairness, Pinkstone said the undesirable developments could have been avoided had the city’s political reform package been approved in 2015.

“If the Beijing electoral process for universal suffrage had been approved by the Legislative Council, I don’t think we would have seen this type of conduct because 3.7 [million] people would have voted, which would have been too many for the invisible hand to control,” he said.

“The proposal should have gone through and the nominating procedure could be dealt with later. At least there would be a foot in the door and Hongkongers could choose the chief executive regardless of the number of nominations secured.”

Pan-democrats had criticised the Beijing-decreed reform plan for enabling the 1,200-member nominating committee to effectively screen out candidates deemed undesirable to Beijing.

Pinkstone stressed he decided to speak out on the election without Ip’s knowledge.

“[It is] a personal reflection of how I saw the way the elections were being run,” he said. “I was shocked into writing this piece.”

On the day she dropped her bid, Ip said she had been “squeezed out” of a “restrictive” electoral system but stopped short of saying she had been treated unfairly, despite reports Beijing had actively canvassed votes for Lam behind the scenes.

Additional reporting by Phila Siu

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