Hong Kong Media Tycoon Jimmy Lai Gets Another Jail Term After Fraud Conviction

Jimmy Lai has been one of the chief targets of the crackdown that followed mass anti-government protests in 2019.

Jimmy Lai has been one of the chief targets of the crackdown that followed mass anti-government protests in 2019. PIcture: AFP

Jimmy Lai, the staunchly pro-democracy Hong Kong media tycoon, was sentenced by a Hong Kong court Saturday to more than five years in prison for fraud over a sublease at the former headquarters of his media company.

Mr Lai, whose widely read publications were some of the most aggressive critics of China’s Communist Party and its locally appointed leaders, has been one of the chief targets of the crackdown that followed mass anti-government protests that swept the city in 2019.

The sentencing is the latest step in a legal campaign that has seen Mr Lai, 75, imprisoned for participating in unauthorised protests and has him facing more-serious national-security charges that carry a possible penalty of life in prison.

Mr Lai’s national-security trial, which was scheduled for this month, has been postponed after the Hong Kong authorities appealed to Beijing to block a foreign lawyer from representing him.

He was sentenced in the fraud case by district court judge Stanley Chan to five years and nine months for using part of the headquarters of his media company, Next Digital, to house a small private consulting company in violation of the terms of the lease with a government-run industrial park.

Mr Lai was convicted in October of two charges of fraud in the case. The two charges are similar but cover separate periods between 1998 and 2020. He denies any wrongdoing.

Wong Wai-keung, a former Next Digital executive, was convicted of one fraud charge and sentenced to a year and nine months in prison.

Defence lawyers argued that the consulting company, which provided secretarial and other services, was related to the overall publishing work Next Digital, and its office space was so small as not to warrant such a serious legal penalty.

The court found that “the fraud scheme was not sophisticated,” but said aggravating factors supported Mr Lai’s punishment, including the 21-year length of lease arrangements, cost savings for the company and tax benefits for Mr. Lai.

Mr Lai’s flagship newspaper, Apple Daily, closed last year after the government froze company assets, seized materials and arrested top executives and editors.

His most serious legal jeopardy stems from another case, the charges filed under the national-security law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020. The authorities accuse him of calling upon foreign governments to levy sanctions against Hong Kong, acts that were banned under the security law.

He has also been charged under colonial-era sedition laws that long sat dormant before being taken up again after the 2019 protests.

Hong Kong’s Department of Justice has sought to block Mr. Lai from employing British lawyer Timothy Owen in his national-security case, saying that he has no special expertise on the security law and that it would be difficult to impose its secrecy requirements on a foreigner.

Last month, Hong Kong’s top court backed lower-court rulings that Mr Lai could have a foreign lawyer, saying the secrecy argument hadn’t been presented at earlier stages.

John Lee, the Hong Kong chief executive, took the rare step of raising the matter with the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top lawmaking body, which has the ultimate power to interpret Hong Kong law.

That move raised concerns about the independence of Hong Kong’s courts and questions over whether overseas nonpermanent judges could also be barred from national-security cases. Such judges have long been seen as having a key role in maintaining Hong Kong’s link with the broader common-law world after the former British colony returned to Chinese control in 1997.

Mr Lee said Beijing’s intervention on the issue was necessary because Hong Kong had no effective way to prevent overseas lawyers from leaking state secrets or being coerced by foreign governments.

The Wall Street Journal