A 10-year-old kidnap victim pretended to faint after struggling with one of his abductors, a court heard yesterday. The boy said he was conscious as he was blindfolded, gagged, tied up, stuffed inside a filing cabinet and driven in a truck to an office on November 16 last year. Ngan Tse-shun, 30, has denied abducting the schoolboy with a second man. The boy spent most of his 24-hour ordeal in the cabinet, apart from brief visits to the toilet and two meals, the Court of First Instance heard. He was woken by noises on the evening of November 17 when police discovered him in a Chai Wan office. The court has heard the boy - whose parents are directors of a listed company - was kidnapped for a $20 million ransom outside his Hong Kong Island school in front of a teacher. At the start of his detention, he was promised $100 if he could drink a bottle of cola faster than one of his kidnappers. 'I could feel there was some powder in the drink but the taste was no different,' he told police in a videotaped interview shown in court. He won the race, only to have his mouth covered by another man, whom he called 'Uncle Long Hair'. 'I felt I could hardly breathe and I kept on struggling,' the boy told police. 'I grabbed hold of his glasses and put them on the floor. I pretended to be unconscious.' His father, the chairman of the company, testified earlier yesterday that he had bargained down the ransom. The man, whose company paid out dividends of more than $40 million in 1997 but none last year, said he received about 10 calls from a kidnapper on November 17. The caller demanded $20 million in a 7.30am call. The father said he would have to check if he had that much money. He said the caller replied: 'You're the chairman of a listed company. The prices of your shares just keep rising without falling. The dividends amount to $20-odd million. It's impossible that you have no money.' The businessman, who cannot be named to protect his son's identity, told prosecutor John Halley that the price of his company's shares had been generally falling. In a later call, the father told the kidnapper that he could only provide $200,000 cash, to which the man snapped: 'I didn't kidnap your son for the sake of a few hundred thousand dollars.' The ransom was negotiated down to $700,000 plus US$3,900 (HK$30,000). But the boy was rescued by police before any money was handed over, the court has heard. The trial before Deputy Judge Michael McMahon continues.
