Former Hong Kong chief secretary Rafael Hui Si-yan has admitted receiving a HKD11 million secret payment “from Beijing” during an ongoing corruption case.
Hui told Hong Kong’s High Court that Liao Hui, the former head of the influential Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office in Beijing, asked Hui (don’t get muddled up with the names now!) to stay in his post for longer during a meeting in 2007, reports RTHK.
Hui declined, citing financial difficulties (we’ll get to those later), which Liao allegedly said he would try to find a way to fix.
Lo and behold, just six months later, Hui received a whole bunch of cash (HKD11 million) from former stock exchange official Francis Kwan, who apparently said it was from “someone in Beijing”.
Clearly uninterested in who that someone was, Hui apparently had no idea that Liao might have played a role in the sudden appearance of the money until the latter reportedly hinted towards it at the sidelines of a meeting in 2008. Hui quoted Liao as telling him to stop overspending.
This was pretty sound advice it seems, as last week Hui admitted giving a girlfriend a casual HKD8 million and spending HKD2 million in a CD shop. Has he never heard of Spotify? He also said he regularly spent hundreds of thousands on hosting banquets, and had a wine collection worth more than HKD7 million.
Hui, pretty unsurprisingly, was therefore always broke, and says he frequently took out loans to pay his taxes while in office.
He is implicated in a corruption case that raises questions about the extent of ties between Hong Kong and Chinese officials. The case involves a series of payments and loans totalling more than HKD37 million, allegedly paid to Hui between 2005 and 2007, while he held office as Hong Kong’s chief secretary.
Hui denies taking bribes. The case continues.
Photo: YouTube screengrab
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