Source:
https://scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3202808/hong-kong-tycoon-jimmy-lai-jailed-5-years-and-9-months-fined-hk2-million-fraud-case-over-deliberate
Hong Kong/ Politics

Hong Kong tycoon Jimmy Lai jailed for 5 years and 9 months, fined HK$2 million in fraud case over ‘deliberate concealment’ of consultancy firm at Apple Daily offices

  • District Court sentences Jimmy Lai, 75, after tycoon was earlier found guilty of two counts of fraud
  • Wong Wai-keung, 61, a former senior executive at Next Digital, also jailed for 21 months
Media mogul Jimmy Lai. Photo: SCMP

Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying has been jailed for 5 years and nine months and fined HK$2 million (US$256,850) for breaching land lease terms in the “deliberate concealment” of a consultancy firm at the offices of his now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper.

The District Court on Saturday ordered Lai, 75, to pay the fine in three months and banned him from managing companies for eight years. Prosecutors are also seeking the confiscation of the publishing mogul’s illegal gains.

Wong Wai-keung, 61, a chief administrative officer at the paper’s parent company Next Digital, was jailed for 21 months.

Judge Stanley Chan Kwong-chi said Lai had played a significant role in deceiving the publication’s landowner under the cover of a “fairly sizeable and reputable” news outlet.

“If a media organisation, representing the so-called fourth power, allowed a firm to occupy its space without authorisation to carry out its businesses, was it not that such organisation did so under the aegis of its reputation as the media?” said Chan, an arbiter approved by the city’s leader to oversee national security proceedings.

“[Lai] had acted under the aegis of the media … This was a fraudulent act which was planned, organised and spanning many years,” the judge continued.

Chan stressed everyone was equal before the law, be it a billionaire or a top-ranking official, as he dismissed any link between the tycoon’s prosecution and press freedom as attempts to “poison the well”.

The offices of the now-closed Apple Daily newspaper in Tseung Kwan O. Photo: Winson Wong
The offices of the now-closed Apple Daily newspaper in Tseung Kwan O. Photo: Winson Wong

The court convicted the two defendants in October after their failure to disclose Dico Consultants’ operations to the landlord, Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation, amounted to deliberate concealment and a fraudulent act that went beyond what would typically be a civil breach of contract.

The corporation had prohibited the use of the offices for anything other than publication and related services.

Lai was found guilty of two fraud charges for allowing the firm’s operations at the newspaper’s headquarters in Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate for more than two decades.

Wong was convicted of one count of the same offence for his role in the deception since 2016.

Lai’s legal team said in mitigation that the tycoon had set up Dico’s office in the Apple Daily building for convenience, and that the offence did not involve a meticulous plan or a breach of trust.

In his background report, Lai told a probation officer he should not have been held liable for Next Digital’s contractual breaches as he had not been involved in its daily operations.

Instead, Lai blamed his then chief operating officer, Royston Chow Tat-kuen, who was given immunity from prosecution after he agreed to help in the cases against his former boss and colleague.

Wong Wai-keung, a former senior executive at Next Digital. Photo: Yik Yeung-man
Wong Wai-keung, a former senior executive at Next Digital. Photo: Yik Yeung-man

But the judge said those contentions only showed the media boss had no remorse at all for his transgressions. While accepting the offences were not major commercial crimes involving sophisticated manipulation, the court said they were still serious in that Dico had been able to discreetly operate in Apple Daily’s offices while paying a lower rent for many years.

Meanwhile, Lai said he was not a political figure and remarked that any condemnation of his prosecution from the United States was “unprompted” and “of no assistance”.

The judge said that statement was made “on purpose” and reiterated any allegations of political persecution would be unfair to the parties involved in the legal proceedings and society as a whole.

Lawyers for Wong earlier highlighted the defendant’s poor health and psychiatric problems in pleading for leniency, adding he had only followed instructions from his superiors, including those from Chow.

Chan expressed sympathy for Wong’s personal circumstances and accepted the former senior executive, who had been suffering from a hearing disability since a young age, had achieved what he had now with great perseverance.

But that did not detract from the gravity of his “blatant” offence as he chose to “hold the candle to the devil” and had expressed no remorse for the crime, Chan said.

The judge set the sentencing starting point at six years imprisonment for Lai and 2½ years for Wong, before reducing their respective terms for a variety of mitigating factors.

The court also imposed a HK$2 million fine on Lai, calculated by subtracting the estimated total amount of rent Apple Daily received from Dico over the latter’s 22-year stay from the approximate sum which would have been paid by the consultancy firm had it borrowed an office space from a commercial site.

Chan warned that a failure to settle the fine on time would result in an additional 12 months in jail.

Maya Wang, associate Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said Lai’s sentence was “incredibly heavy” for “trumped-up charges”, adding “it’s clear what Beijing’s intentions are”.

Reporters Without Borders, a French-based nonprofit organisation advocating freedom of information, called for Lai’s immediate release.

“Illegal demonstration, fraud, national security crimes – the diversity of the charges held against Jimmy Lai, and the staggering severity of the sentences imposed on him, show how desperate the Chinese regime is to silence this symbolic figure of press freedom in Hong Kong,” said Cedric Alviani, the group’s East Asia Bureau head.

Lai on Thursday marked his birthday behind bars for the third consecutive year, having spent most of the past two years in the maximum security Stanley Prison.

He was sentenced last year to a total of 20 months’ jail for his roles in four unauthorised assemblies.

Despite completing that sentence, he remains locked up awaiting a High Court trial without a jury over more serious allegations of colluding with foreign forces.

That case, however, has been indefinitely postponed pending Beijing’s decision on whether he can be represented by an overseas lawyer of his choice.

Apple Daily closed amid a crackdown under the city’s national security law in June last year.