MR DEACON Chiu Te-ken had just one piece of advice for his son, David, as he walked away from the High Court last Monday a free man: ''This is over now. Put it all behind you and make up for lost time.'' And that is exactly what Mr David Chiu Tat-cheong intends to do, now that he has been cleared of fraud charges hanging over his head for the last five years.
''My dream,'' he said in an exclusive interview with Sunday Money, ''is to restore Far East Consortium Ltd to where it once was . . . one of Hongkong's top 30 capitalised companies. Today, FEC languishes in the bottom 200 companies according to market capitalisation though it still controls assets of around $2 billion.
''It won't happen overnight but it will happen in time. I am young and our management team is young. But above all we have the same goal.'' Although one of the territory's biggest property players in the 1970s and early '80s, Mr Chiu does not see Hongkong holding the key to FEC's future.
When the phones stopped ringing, soon after his arrest by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), the managing director of FEC quickly found himself standing alone in Hongkong's business community.
Although he never doubted his own innocence, others did.
''People in Hongkong think that when you are charged you are bad,'' he said. ''The Chinese don't look at such things in an English perspective . . . that is you are innocent until proven guilty.'' He personally shouldered much of the burden of the last five years but could not entirely shield his family, especially his children from the public spotlight.