Controversial Hong Kong businessman Lew Mon-hung found guilty of perverting course of justice, faces 18 months in jail
He sent letters and emails to city’s chief executive and anti-graft head asking them to halt investigation
Controversial businessman Lew Mon-hung has been sentenced to 18 months in jail for perverting the course of justice over letters and emails he sent to Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying and the city’s anti-graft chief in a bid to halt an investigation into him.
The two letters and two emails came back to bite Lew – despite his earlier acquittal over the very case he sought to scuttle – at the District Court on Monday. He was found guilty of one count of perverting the course of public justice.
Lew tried to stop the investigation for a High Court case concerning Pearl Oriental Oil, the listed company of which he was once vice-chairman. He was acquitted in that case.
Sentencing Lew, Judge Frankie Yiu Fun-che said: “This is serious in that the defendants sent letters to the highest-ranking officials in the administrative government, the chief executive and the head of an executive department.”
Lew, 67, was accused of sending Leung and Simon Peh, commissioner of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, a total of four letters and emails on January 9 and 10, 2013, after he was arrested and investigated for fraud.
Yiu yesterday found these documents contained threatening phrases.
READ MORE: Lew Mon-hung – the man who turned his back on Hong Kong’s chief executive
Lew was calm when he heard the sentence. “History will rule that I am innocent,” he yelled from the dock, vowing to make an appeal.
He spoke of karma when asked what he would like to say to Leung, his former ally. “When what goes around has not come around, it is because the time has not arrived,” he said. “When the timing has arrived, everything vanishes.”
Yiu took into account the enormous pressure Lew faced over the past three years. He also cited past contributions Lew made to the city, documented in a mitigation letter by former chief executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen.
Yiu sentenced him to 18 months, but said what Lew did could have warranted a jail term of more than two years.
During the trial, the court heard parts of the letters suggested Lew would drop a “political bomb” on Leung.
He also mentioned how he helped Leung in his political career before the pair fell out.
Senior public prosecutor Anna Lai had argued that Lew wanted to stop the investigation by using his former close ties with Leung to threaten him, but Lew said he was framed and politically persecuted by Leung.
Lew also claimed he urged Leung and Peh to stop the investigation because he believed it was unreasonable. He testified earlier that he would have welcomed it if it were reasonable.
But yesterday, Yiu rejected that and said Lew, a regular contributor to the city's newspapers, would not have had to resort to threatening words he used – such as “die together” and “an eye for an eye” to make that point.
Lew, Yiu said, could have listed what crime he thought the two had committed and even reported them to the authorities.
But instead, Lew gave “extraordinary explanations hardly acceptable to anyone” in court, the judge said in a written judgment.
If it was as Lew suggested, the judge added, he would not have had to mention his past campaigning efforts for Leung and ask Leung “to shake hands with Peh”.
Earlier, Lew’s barrister Joseph Tse Wah-yuen SC argued that Leung and Peh had no power to cease an investigation, and hence there would be no tendency to pervert on Lew’s part.
But Yiu disgreed. He said the pair were given the power under Hong Kong laws.
Over the past three years, Lew had also been stripped off his post at the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a chance to run for its standing committee, Tse said.
Lew, who has been barred from leaving Hong Kong, had not seen his parents on the mainland since being on bail.
Lew, accompanied by his two daughters, waved goodbye to his supporters from the dock before being taken away by officers.
