Analysis How bribe-taker Rafael Hui’s taste for the high life led to his fall from grace

When he became Hong Kong's No2 man in 2005, Rafael Hui Si-yan quipped it was a "nightmare" he had never imagined would befall him. That, however, did not stop the veteran civil servant nicknamed the "king of strategies" - for his political acumen - from turning the appointment into a lucrative dream.

The real nightmare unfolded much later. Hui cut a forlorn figure as he sat in the dock at the Court of First Instance yesterday, listening to the guilty verdicts handed to him by a jury of nine lay men and women after a high-profile 131-day trial.

Bribe-taker Hui, 66, makes history as the most senior ex-government official ever to be convicted in Hong Kong in its 150 years as a British colony and its decade-plus as a special administrative region of China.

Hui was found guilty of accepting HK$8.5 million in bribes from Sun Hung Kai Properties co-chairman Thomas Kwok Ping-kwong, SHKP executive director Thomas Chan Kui-yuen and former stock exchange official Francis Kwan Hung-sang, as well as a charge of conspiracy to offer an advantage to a public servant relating to a HK$11.182 million from Chan and Kwan, in return for him to be, in the prosecution's words, "favourably disposed to the developer". Hui was also convicted of three charges of misconduct in public office.

It was as though Hui had prophesied his own downfall when, at the start of his tenure as chief secretary on June 30, 2005, he joked to journalists: "In all my nightmares, I never dreamt that I would be sitting here."

Just a few hours before that, he had taken the last of the HK$8.5 million from Kwok. At the media conference, he claimed to have earned less than HK$10 million a year at SHKP, when in fact, as he admitted in court, Kwok guaranteed him HK$15 million.