The event – held in a Wan Chai Spanish tapas bar on January 3 by pro-Beijing figure Witman Hung Wai-man to celebrate his 53rd birthday – has snowballed into a major embarrassment for Lam’s government over the past weeks.

Lam concluded that Allen Fung Ying-lun, political assistant to the development secretary, and Vincent Fung Hao-yin, deputy head of Policy Innovation and Coordination Office, would receive verbal warnings for violating social-distancing rules.

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But the spotlight was on Tsui, who resigned hours before Lam met the press to confirm how the appointed official, charged with combating the pandemic, had stayed for a long time at the party, chatted to others without wearing a mask and had not used the “Leave Home Safe” app while there.

Lam said she had informed Beijing, which is responsible for such appointments, to remove him. The central government has so far not made a statement, while Tsui resigned, citing how he had to take responsibility for his actions.

Lau Siu-kai, vice-chairman of Beijing’s semi-official Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies, said of the episode: “It shows that in the future, neither the Hong Kong government and Beijing will back officials who have committed a serious mistake.”

He added it also underscored how even officials with backing from a large political party could no longer dodge responsibility and hide behind others, when the issues in question went to the heart of the credibility of the government or Beijing’s implementation of its “patriots-only” governance system.

Tsui, Hong Kong’s first political appointee to rise through the ranks to become a minister, is a member of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), the city’s largest pro-establishment party.

A source close to the Hong Kong government said the DAB cared very much about Tsui’s fate because political appointees had been the major way for its members to make an impact since the expansion of the political appointment system in 2008.

Ip Kwok-him, a member of the Executive Council, Lam’s de facto cabinet, had raised Tsui’s fate with the city leader during three meetings of the top policymaking body since the incident hit the headlines on January 6, sources told the Post.

“But the DAB’s efforts to save Tsui’s political fortune illustrates it still falls short of the quality expected for a party playing a key role in the governing process,” said the source.

The source said the central government had adopted an impartial approach from the beginning and respected the chief executive’s decision in handling Tsui, despite lobbying from the political party.

“The DAB has to swallow it because the central government has decided to follow the wish of the chief executive,” he said.

Lau said Lam’s verdict would help the government boost the public confidence in its accountability system, as he shrugged off suggestions that the chief executive had merely adopted a “kill-a-chicken-to-scare-the monkeys” approach.

The remaining 12 officials were cleared, while Fung, the political assistant, only received a verbal warning despite findings showing he stayed at the party for over four hours and could not remember if he wore a mask as a result of the alcohol he had consumed.

“But Fung was not an official directly involved in the fight for the pandemic,” Lau said.

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On Monday, the chief executive revealed that Tsui had attended two core internal meetings on measures to tighten social-distancing rules on December 31 and January 3 – hours before going to the party.

Public administration scholar John Burns, from the University of Hong Kong, said the government would need to do more to win back public trust.

“The government hasn’t provided us with the report to the chief executive. She apparently believed that it was appropriate for officials to attend this sort of function,” he said, adding that the public needed to know what rules those officials had broken, if any.

He agreed that Lam’s handling of the scandal was a start to address what he described as a failure of the accountability system. “But [it] is insufficient to re-establish its credibility.”

Tsui, who earned about HK$390,000 per month, will lose out on the HK$1.9 million (US$243,720) he could have made if had stayed on until the current government completed its term at the end of June.

While the government might have dealt with Tsui, analysts said questions remained over Hung’s fate.

A pro-establishment politician well-connected with the mainland authorities said that he did not expect Hung to be removed from his post as a local deputy to the national legislature even though he had embarrassed the body.

“It would be too big a fuss to sack Hung. A more desirable scenario would be he resigns as NPC deputy or chooses to be absent from NPC meetings before his tenure expires in March next year,” the pro-Beijing figure said.

Additional reporting by Gary Cheung