Professional-democracy Hong Kong writer Jimmy Lai was discovered responsible Tuesday on two fraud prices associated to lease violations, the most recent in a collection of prosecutions apparently aimed toward punishing him for his previous activism.
Lai was arrested throughout a crackdown on the pro-democracy motion following widespread protests in 2019 and underneath the town’s sweeping Beijing-imposed Nationwide Safety Regulation. He's already serving a 20-month sentence for his function in unauthorized assemblies.
His media firm, Subsequent Digital, revealed the now-shuttered Apple Each day, Hong Kong’s final pro-democracy newspaper.
Lai additionally faces collusion prices underneath the Nationwide Safety Regulation and a separate sedition cost. His former colleague, Wong Wai-keung, was convicted Tuesday on a single cost of fraud.
Lai and two former executives at his firm had been charged with fraud for subletting a part of the workplace area to a secretarial agency, which was additionally managed by Lai, between 2016 and 2020. Their transfer allegedly violated lease agreements with the Hong Kong Science and Expertise Parks Corp. The second fraud rely was for letting the identical agency use the media outlet’s workplace area in alleged breach of lease agreements from 1998 and 2015.
District Court docket Decide Stanley Chan Kwong-chi mentioned the agency’s enterprise didn't conform with what was stipulated within the lease agreements, and dominated that Lai had hidden the truth that the corporate was occupying area within the constructing. He mentioned he didn't consider Lai had forgotten the enterprise was utilizing the workplace.
One of many executives, Royston Chow, made a deal earlier this yr to assist with Lai’s and Wong’s prosecution in trade for exemption from felony legal responsibility.
Legal professionals for Lai are asking the United Nations to research his imprisonment and a number of felony prices as “authorized harassment” to punish him for talking out.
Armed with the Nationwide Safety Regulation, prosecutors have introduced instances towards folks for clapping in court docket, sentenced 5 speech therapists to just about two years in jail for his or her function within the publication of youngsters’s books deemed seditious and placed on trial a 90-year-old Roman Catholic cardinal and 5 others accused of failing to register a now-defunct fund to help folks arrested within the mass anti-government protests three years in the past.
That has undermined religion in the way forward for Hong Kong as a bustling bastion of finance, with growing numbers of younger professionals responding to the shrinking freedoms by transferring overseas.
Electoral reforms have ensured that solely these deemed to be “patriots” by Beijing serve within the metropolis’s legislature. China has put in John Lee, a profession safety official, as the town’s new chief government.
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