by Jessie Pang and James Pomfret
HONG KONG (Reuters) – Hong Kong pro-democracy tycoon Jimmy Lai was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison on Saturday for fraud, found guilty of breaching the lease of the headquarters of a liberal newspaper he ran .
Jimmy Lai was found guilty of two counts of fraud for concealing the activities of a private company, Dico Consultants Ltd, at the headquarters of the now-closed Apple Daily newspaper, in violation of its ground lease.
The 75-year-old, who is among Hong Kong’s most prominent China critics, has been jailed since December 2020 and has already served a 20-month sentence for unauthorized gatherings.
Jimmy Lai was the head of Next Digital, the parent company of Apple Daily which closed in June 2021 after a police raid. Another Next Digital executive, Wong Wai-Keung, 61, was convicted of fraud and jailed for 21 months
District Court Judge Stanley Chan wrote in his ruling that Lai had “acted under the protective umbrella of a media organization.” He added that these charges against a media mogul “did not amount to an attack on freedom of the press”.
The judge deducted three months from his sentence because Jimmy Lai had admitted much of the prosecution’s case.
Western governments, including the United States, have expressed concern about the tycoon’s fate and condemned what they say is a general deterioration in the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms under the national security imposed by China.
“Beijing’s elaborate criminal case against Jimmy Lai is a vendetta against a leading proponent of democracy and media freedom in Hong Kong,” said Maya Wang, Asia director New York-based Human Rights Watch, which called for Lai’s release.
Prosecutors said that under the terms of the newspaper’s lease on government land in a science park, the property could only be used for “editing and printing” without prior approval from the operator.
Stanley Chan issued an order barring Jimmy Lai from becoming a director of any company for eight years and fined him HK$2 million ($260,000).
Another trial, relating to national security and involving the tycoon, is due to resume on Tuesday. It has been delayed while Beijing weighs in on the contentious issue of whether foreign lawyers, including Lai’s British lawyer Timothy Owen, should be allowed to work on national security cases.
(Report Jessie Pang and James Pomfret, French version Benjamin Mallet)