Hong Kong Standard directors knew the company was running a circulation scam, a former senior executive said yesterday.
The newspaper had been falsifying sales through distributors for many years, ex-group general manager Jim Marett claimed.
'They were clearly aware of it. I realised they did not want me to know they knew about it,' he told the District Court. But he admitted he had never discussed the overprinting and dumping of newspapers with senior management, including directors Sally Aw Sian and Lawrence Wong Yue-kai.
He had talked about circulation figures at weekly management meetings but no senior people mentioned the scam, he said. Mr Marett said he later learned Mr Wong was a director of Eccles Enterprises, a company the Hong Kong Standard allegedly used to inflate sales figures.
Ms Aw was also a director of Eccles Enterprises, the court heard.
Eccles Enterprises replaced a distributor called Senior Premier, which had also been used to inflate circulation figures, it was alleged. General manager Henrietta So Shuk-wa, 35, finance manager Tang Cheong-shing, 49, and former circulation director David Wong Wai-shing, 45, deny plotting with Ms Aw to defraud advertisers.
Ms Aw, chairwoman of Sing Tao Holdings, has been named as a co-conspirator but has not been charged.