LettersWhat do Hong Kong massage parlour and hotpot scandals indicate?

Two incidents illustrating security officials’ lack of good professional judgment only came to light because of separate police actions

Hong Kong national security law (NSL)

Letters

Published: 6:17am, 21 Jul, 2021

Why you can trust SCMP

I commend the letter “ Why questions still linger over hotpot dinner” (July 15) and wish to add comment.

Are our security officials just unlucky or have they become so arrogant that they are unconcerned about long-established civil service ethics and public opinion?

In May, the public became aware that a senior national security officer had some time earlier been caught in a police raid on an unlicensed massage parlour.

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Hong Kong police investigate top national security officer caught in massage parlour raid

Now in July, news breaks that the director of Immigration, the Customs and Excise commissioner and the undersecretary for Security attended a lavish dinner in a private Wan Chai club in March, where one of the guests was an executive of a mainland Chinese real estate giant.

The only reason that this event became public news is due to a police investigation into an allegation of attempted rape made by a guest against another attendee at this party (not one of the three officials).

Thus, both incidents illustrating security officials’ lack of good professional judgment only came to light because of separate police actions.

Is the implication then that such hobnobbing and indiscretions are not one-off events, but perhaps now a norm for senior officials?

The lame excuse that they didn’t know the dinner at the luxury clubhouse would be “lavish” beggars belief.

A hotpot dinner too hot for Hong Kong government to handle

I am also surprised our security chief doesn’t realise that sacrificing family time as part of their job is the norm for the majority of people in Hong Kong – no community sympathy is due on this account (“ Sacrificing family time part of the job, say security chief in defence of hotpot trio”, July 15).

Our Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, as a leadership hopeful in 2017, had declared that former chief executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen was her role model. Therefore, her officials should have learned from the last months of Tsang’s tenure when he was embroiled in a series of corruption allegations due to his hobnobbing with business and property developer tycoons.

The three officials are lucky that Apple Daily was no longer in operation when their “social gathering” became public knowledge, as their criticisms would doubtlessly have been much more stinging than the South China Morning Post editorial, “ Officials must show better judgment” (July 10).

P.C. Law, Quarry Bay