Ex-aide of former Hong Kong leader CY Leung loses appeal against financial fraud conviction

Barry Cheung Chun-yuen, who just passed his 64th birthday behind bars on Tuesday, is serving a four-year jail term at the maximum-security Stanley Prison for fraud and conspiracy to defraud over his attempts to keep his commodities market afloat before authorities shut it down in May 2013.

Collecting the Court of Appeal’s judgment on Wednesday, the disgraced businessman appeared to have lost weight compared with when he stood trial in the District Court in 2020. He had a brief conversation with his lawyer before prison officers escorted him away.

Cheung, who founded the now-defunct Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange (HKMEx), acted as Leung’s campaign chairman when the latter ran for the city’s top job and later as an executive councillor after Leung took office in 2012.

But he stayed less than a year in Leung’s de facto cabinet before resigning from all public posts following two decades of public service when the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) launched an investigation into HKMEx.

He was convicted in July 2020 for conspiring with his then chief financial officer Jacky Choi Tat-ying to hide the true financial position of the platform and for misleading the SFC into letting HKMEx keep its authorisation to provide automated trading services.