Just Saying | Let’s call out Hong Kong politicians who lie - like 'Long Hair' Leung Kwok-hung and his 'HK$100 million bribe'
Yonden Lhatoo has had enough of the wild claims, the latest of which was Long Hair’s confessed untruth concerning an alleged bribery attempt
I usually prefer to avoid commenting on politics, which I find to be a business where nothing is quite what it seems, but there are some things just screaming to be said. I’m talking about the bribery claims by lawmaker Leung Kwok-hung, Hong Kong’s self-styled revolutionary and dissident, better known as Long Hair.
I choked on my cornflakes over the weekend when I saw him on the news claiming to have been offered HK$100 million to vote yes to the government’s reform package.
Depending on who’s talking, the blueprint for the 2017 chief executive election is either a tremendous opportunity for Hong Kong to achieve universal suffrage, or a total whitewash by Beijing to ensure it keeps pulling the strings while giving the impression it’s allowing the people to choose their own leader.
Whatever Long Hair was hoping to achieve, it has backfired. If we are to believe his story, he was first approached in February by a mysterious “middleman”, presumably acting in Beijing’s interests, who offered to buy his vote for HK$100 million. He quietly sat on this for more than three months until Saturday, when he decided to go public with it and landed in a quagmire he had definitely not bargained for.
The first whopper came on Saturday night when, confronted by the Post, he admitted he had simply fabricated the HK$100 million figure to attract media attention. Wow. Really? What else has he been fabricating in the Legislative Council for the sake of the media? His explanation: he knows the rules of the game and if he had not come up with a figure, the media would have doubted his story. What a bunch of bovine faeces.
To start with, this goes far beyond lobbing bananas and other missiles at hapless government officials in the Legco chamber. This is about lying, plain and simple. In public. On the record. And then blaming it on the media. That’s not acceptable from an elected lawmaker. It’s also about insulting the intelligence of the Hong Kong media and public.