Former Hong Kong media boss Jimmy Lai Chee-ying enters his sixth day of his testimony on Thursday at West Kowloon Court as the judges look at his meetings with one of the prosecution witnesses in relation to his national security law charges.
Lai, 76, has pleaded not guilty to two charges of conspiring to collude with foreign forces under the 2020 security law, as well as a third count of conspiracy to print and distribute seditious publications in breach of colonial-era legislation.
On Wednesday, the fifth day of the ex-mogul’s oral testimony, the court read from an Apple Daily article which said Lai had suggested the United States sanction mainland Chinese and Hong Kong officials who had suppressed the 2019 protest movement in a meeting with former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.
Lai said there was “no reason to doubt the accuracy” of the article but he did not recall mentioning sanctions in the meeting.
Lai said he had no knowledge of the lobbying group “Fight For Freedom, Stand With Hong Kong” (SWHK), in which prosecution witness Andy Li Yu-hin was a core member.
Despite having hashtags that read “Stand With Hong Kong” on his social media posts, he said his staff had added the wordings for him and it did not refer to the group.
He also responded to the HK$5 million (US$642,500) loan he agreed to lend to a group of anonymous activists who wanted a bridging loan to pay for newspaper adverts during a Group of 20 (G20) summit in Japan in 2019.
But he said he did not know one of the payees was Li, and “did not care” about the identity and name of the group, as his assistant Mark Simon was the one who handled the transaction.
His lawyers spent the rest of Wednesday’s hearing on the meetings between Lai and paralegal Wayland Chan Tsz-wah, who became a prosecution witness after pleading guilty to colluding with foreign forces.
Lai said his impression of Chan was that he was “a young man in the frontier” and “conservative”, and he first met him with the purpose of conveying to the “violent people on the front” that their actions were damaging to the anti-government movement.
He said he also hoped “the young radicals’ violence [at the front lines] would be pacified”.
But Lai denied Chan’s allegations regarding the second meeting that he had wished to become a leader of the protesters or “play a dominating role in the valiant camp”, as well as that he could achieve, through Apple Daily, some of the protesters’ objectives that they could accomplish not on their own.
The court will continue to look into Lai’s third meeting with Chan on Thursday.
The Post covers the latest updates from the trial below:
Lai denies asking protesters to connect with ‘international front’
As the trial resumes, defence lawyer Steven Kwan continues to question Lai about his third meeting in late November 2019 with paralegal Wayland Chan Tsz-wah.
Chan, who faces a collusion charge, had testified that Lai hoped the paralegal would ask “valiant” protesters at the “frontier” to set up a leadership group that would connect them with forces in the legislature, on the “international front”. He also claimed that Lai told him to grab the chance to “push the government to the edge”.
Lai tells the court that he could have said something related to “building on the momentum” after opposition figures celebrated a landslide victory in the district council election. But he denies using the term “international front”, saying it was never a subject on his mind.
Lai only agrees that he had hoped to unite the protesters and legislators via a leadership group. But his support of the opposition camp, Lai argues, did not extend to the “localist camp” calling for Hong Kong independence, whom Chan said Lai had endorsed during the election.
“The localist camp is never [the] kind of people I like to approach because I am always against Hong Kong independence,” the former tycoon tells the court.
Lai also denies knowing any of the localists or having ever had contact with them.
More from South China Morning Post:
- Jimmy Lai says he may have asked US official to sanction Beijing and Hong Kong
- Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai claims ‘no knowledge’ of advocacy group he lent money to
- Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai wanted to lure foreign readers with ‘negative’ mainland China news
- Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai failed to get Pence, Pompeo to subscribe to Apple Daily – as it happened
For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2024.
