Hong Kong's anti-money-laundering laws make a mockery out of justice
"I immediately realised I was being hired … to hide the source and beneficiaries of shady transactions potentially worth hundreds of millions of euros."
There follows a story in classic 1960s comic book style of how the good Antonio, under the Hollywood pseudonym of Tony Corleone (stop laughing), pinned a Hong Kong money-laundering charge on a Slovakian citizen who last week was jailed for four years.
Score another for the angels and a start in journalism for Antonio. We gave him a full page on Sunday to tell his story.
But although long on cloak and dagger, it came up short in answering one crucial question. Money laundering is dealing in the proceeds of a crime. Just what crime was it from which these proceeds proceeded?
Antonio gave the question short shrift: "Where is the money coming from? Who are the real big fish? This is not the end of my story. It is only the beginning."
I understand the sentiment. A career in journalism cannot consist of just one offering. More must follow if I am to remove the word "putative" from my description of Antonio as a journalist. Yet one supposes that he might at least have hinted in his first piece just what the underlying crime was.
Let's approach this dark story from a different perspective. Headquartered in Paris is a police-like intergovernmental body called the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which "works to generate the necessary political will to bring about national legislative and regulatory reforms" on money laundering.
It does this by threatening to make life difficult in Europe and the US for the financial systems of countries that do not follow its dictates and it keeps regular tabs on how they are doing, measuring this to a large extent by how many people are sent to jail for how long.
In 2008 we were rated as only "partially compliant" but in 2012 were judged to have made "substantial progress". The next key date comes up in just six months, a fourth round evaluation. Hong Kong had best ready itself.
We practice a gross breach of one of its most fundamental principles of rule of law
And Hong Kong has. We have found an easy way to score high on FATF's imprisonment rating scale. We have taken away the requirement of an underlying crime. In our system you are guilty of laundering the proceeds of a crime if you look like you were doing it, whether or not there was a crime.
It sounds incredible and yet it is fact, courtesy of the administration of that supposed paragon of virtue, governor Chris Patten. We pride ourselves on rule of law and yet we practice a gross breach of one of its most fundamental principles.
A steady stream of victims of this injustice has been jailed over the years. Most of them, from what I can see, were cash couriers bringing money across the mainland border to facilitate commerce with the mainland, a perfectly innocuous activity and not illegal here although frowned on by Beijing.
This is commerce, however, and, while the majesty of the law understands its majestic self, it mostly pronounces in ignorance on financial matters. Thus …
But one assumes that a pang of conscience must occasionally strike them. Among the jailed is a 62-year-old woman, a public housing tenant, serving a 10-year sentence because this perversion of justice allowed prosecutors to make her out as a big-time international criminal. Shame on our lawmakers and judiciary, I say.
How less troubling to the conscience then if, to help satisfy FATF's punitive requirements ahead of a crucial inspection date, a foreigner should take it on himself to volunteer as an undercover witness against another foreigner in a money-laundering case.
Everything including the underlying crime, if there was one, took place outside Hong Kong. The only thing that happened here was the opening of a bank account and the transfer of some funds into it. But it was enough to qualify the prison sentence as a Hong Kong score on FATF's books.
Antonio, you were way out of your depth. Stay home.
