The city’s divisive former leader, CY Leung, is making people angry again.
A day after a judge ruled that airport security rules had, in fact, been breached in 2016, when airport staff carried a bag through security and delivered to his daughter, the ex-chief executive took to Facebook to humbly apologize for the whole thing… nah, just kidding.
CY Leung blasted the judicial review as a “political act” and continued to insist that it had always been normal practice for airport staff to deliver hand luggage to passengers at the gate.
In a ruling published yesterday, the High Court disagreed, with Justice Anderson Chow Ka-ming ruling in favor of flight attendant Law Mei-mei.
Law had initiated a judicial review into the case that, if you’ll remember, was a super scandal at the time.
There were allegations Leung used a bit of ‘do you know who I am’ to get staff to retrieve the bag that had been left in the non-restricted section of the airport.
The court was asked to determine whether a cabin bag could be taken through security screening without the passenger accompanying it.
Under rules that were in place at the time, Chow found that it could not.
“I consider it to be clear, upon the true construction of Section 6.2.10 of the Pre-April 2018 Version of the HKASP, that the presence of the passenger is required at the primary screening of his cabin baggage,” he wrote, referencing regulations contained in the Hong Kong Aviation Security Programme.
The rules were later changed to drop the requirement though, in the wake of the ruling, there have been calls they be changed back.
Chow also said Leung’s argument that the Airport Authority (AA) had always allowed “courtesy deliveries” of handling left-behind luggage, “didn’t sit well with the evidence”.
Following the remarks by Leung on his Facebook page — which he used repeatedly earlier this month to attack the Foreign Correspondents Club (FCC) over hosting a speech by a pro-independence advocate — the Cabin Crew Federation (CCF) countered.
Speaking to RTHK, the CCF’s spokeswoman Carol Ng slammed Leung for his “irresponsible” remarks.
“I just don’t understand why he keeps using political reason, political drives, against the others, when a judgement clearly defines and explains what was right and what was wrong on that night,” she said.
