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Jimmy Lai’s lawyers tell Hong Kong court he did not instruct Apple Daily to create list of city and mainland Chinese officials for US sanctions
- Lai’s defence team says he did not tell Apple Daily staff to push limits of national security law with list of people for US sanctions
- Lawyer says a message forwarded by Lai was mistaken for an instruction to follow up on the prospect of US sanctions
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Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying’s legal team has argued he did not tell his now-closed Apple Daily newspaper to test the limits of the national security law by drawing up a sanctions list for the United States to penalise city and mainland Chinese officials.
Robert Pang Yiu-hung, senior counsel for the defence, on Wednesday said a forwarded text message from Lai was mistaken for an instruction to follow up on the prospect of US sanctions after then US president Donald Trump signed an executive order in July 2020 to take punitive measures against people said to have undermined Hong Kong’s autonomy.
Lai was earlier said to have asked Apple Daily staff to “work up a s*** list” of those involved in “censorship or other activities with respect to Hong Kong that prohibit, limit, or penalise the exercise of freedom of expression or assembly by citizens of Hong Kong” and highlighted the Trump directive.
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But Pang told West Kowloon Court the message might have been written by an American rather than Lai and singled out a paragraph in the message, dated July 15 that year, where the writer used “we” in relation to the United States.
“It’s possible that you misunderstood his message,” the senior counsel told ex-associate publisher Chan Pui-man, who got the message.
But Chan, a defendant turned prosecution witness, pushed back at the contention and said such a reading of the text would be “very strange”.
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