Extradition bill critics find friend in fugitive tycoon Joseph Lau

Joseph Lau Luen-hung can hire the best legal brains money can buy. His own son, Lau Ming-wai, holds a doctorate in law and is an occasional lecturer at Harvard Law School.

So the fugitive tycoon has everyone scratching their heads when it emerges that he has applied for a judicial review to challenge the government’s controversial plan to allow the extradition of suspects from Hong Kong to the mainland, Taiwan and Macau.

Lau is, of course, worried. The former chairman of China Estates Holdings was sentenced to more than five years in jail by a Macau court in 2014 in a corruption scandal that involved paying a HK$20 million bribe to Macau’s notorious ex-public works chief Ao Man-long, who was jailed for 29 years in 2012. But has Lau jumped the gun? His application flies in the face of basic legal principles. There isn’t even an extradition law in place that Lau and his legal team can challenge at the moment.

The passage of the bill is far from assured. Even if it passes, it’s not clear that the bill, already amended to drop nine commercial crimes from the proposed list of 46 extraditable offences, will not be changed again.

In his judicial application, Lau’s lawyers argue that such an extradition, if enacted against him, would be retroactive and would contravene a fundamental principle of common law. But a law is only unfair when applied retroactively to acts that were not illegal before its enactment. Lau is simply a fugitive from justice in Macau.