Lawyers question court rulings in Nina Wang case
Veteran lawyers yesterday questioned rulings by the Court of Final Appeal that made it difficult for the prosecution to press ahead with criminal charges in Nina Wang Kung Yu-sum's probate case.
Some said the highest court had taken an 'unusual' and 'extraordinary' approach by handling tasks that should have been dealt with by lower courts, especially with the ruling that the 1990 document at the centre of the dispute was the last valid will of Mrs Wang's husband, Teddy Wang Teh-huei.
'It was an extraordinary case that ended in extraordinary circumstances,' said a senior lawyer unconnected to the case.
'It is an unusual step for the Court of Final Appeal to interfere with the findings of facts and make its own findings of facts. It didn't have the benefit of actual evidence. Instead, they looked at the materials in paper and on black-and-white statements.'
The lawyer said the court should have returned the case for relitigation to the lower courts, where witnesses could be examined by both parties.
Mrs Wang took her case to the Court of Final Appeal last year after both the Court of First Instance and the Court of Appeal ruled in favour of her 94-year-old father-in-law, Wang Din-shin, who claimed she had forged the will to inherit the $27 billion Chinachem estate.
She won the case at the highest court in September, but still had to face three charges - forgery, using a false instrument and performing acts intended to pervert the course of public justice.
A judge in the Court of Final Appeal judgment said: 'In my view, when all the evidence is taken into account, the appellant has clearly discharged her burden of proving, on the balance of probabilities, that the 1990 will is the will of [Teddy] Wang.'
Since both the probate and the criminal cases relied to a large extent on the same evidence, and the standard of proof required for evidence in a criminal case was higher than in a civil case, the prosecution in Mrs Wang's criminal case was put in a very 'awkward' position, some said.
The government's withdrawal of the three charges against her had been anticipated by many in and outside the case.
Solicitor Andrew Lam Ping-cheung said he disagreed with the highest court's ruling that evidence given by handwriting experts on the authenticity of the will was of much less importance than the statutory declaration of the will by Tse Ping-yim, the family's butler, who died before giving further evidence to court.
The experts' evidence formed the backbone of the 172-day trial in the Court of First Instance.
'I personally find it difficult to accept that the CFA had almost totally disregarded evidence from handwriting experts,' he said.
But solicitor Daniel Wong Kwok-tung said the burden of proof for the authenticity of the will lay with the father-in-law's party.
