Cheung Sing-chi and his brother are sentenced for manipulating the fashion firm's share price The former chairman of fashion firm Gay Giano International was dragged from the dock of the District Court yesterday, screaming his innocence after he was jailed for manipulating the stock market and boosting the clothing retailer's share price. Cheung Sing-chi, 41, and his wife had to be pulled apart by Correctional Service Officers after Deputy Judge Bernadette Woo handed down a 16-month sentence. As his sobbing wife screamed: 'I love you', Cheung twice yelled out: 'I didn't do it, stupid judge'. Judge Woo had already left the courtroom. Cheung and his elder brother, Cheung For-sang, 49, who was the company's executive director, were found guilty of conspiracy to defraud shareholders between October 1999 and October 2000. Cheung For-sang was jailed for 13 months. It is believed both men will appeal against their convictions. Judge Woo said that illegal market manipulation eroded the confidence that shareholders and others had in Hong Kong as a reputable, important financial centre. 'For when a director [or] chairman gives way to temptation and involves himself in a conspiracy to defraud because of greed or other wicked reasons, it is usually his shareholders who end up being innocent victims,' she said. 'His actions not only tarnish the image of his company, but undermine the confidence investors have in publicly-listed companies. 'The court has a duty not only to discourage such misdeeds, but those who do so invite on themselves the high hand of the law and invite little sympathy.' Dismissing any mitigation relating to the impact that jail sentences would have on the Cheung family, Judge Woo said: 'The defendants should have thought of their family situation before they committed an offence and not after.' Judge Woo also banned the brothers from assuming any company directorship for three years. The court had heard that the pair enlisted stockbrokers Raymond Wong Wing-cheung, 34, and Stephen Lee Sing-wai, 36, to create the appearance that Gay Giano stocks were being heavily traded after they were floated on April 13, 2000. The subsequent rise in share prices - 52.9 per cent over two days in June - made other investors join in the apparent buying frenzy.
