Pro-democracy protesters display a picture of Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying and “hell money” on a main road in an occupied area outside government headquarters in Hong Kong’s Admiralty
The battle for Hong Kong’s future is being fought with bamboo barricades and bags of dirty tricks.
Like in the pages of an airport thriller, potentially embarrassing tip offs are being leaked to the press on both sides of the Hong Kong democracy debate.
While the police used chain saws and sledge hammers on Oct. 13 to tear down some barricades of protesters who have occupied swathes of the city for more than two weeks in a fight for free elections, a more subtle combat is also taking place.
The latest skirmish concerns Hong Kong’s leader, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, and allegations he failed to disclose a HK$50 million (USD6.4 million) payment from an Australian construction company after it bought a property services firm at which he was a director. The reports come as Leung’s ultimate boss, Chinese President Xi Jinping, pushes ahead with an anti-corruption campaign that’s netted thousands of party cadres.
The disclosure of UGL Ltd.’s payment to Leung, published by an Australian newspaper last week, might offer China’s top leaders a “face-saving formula” for easing him out only if they don’t see an alternative, said Willy Wo-Lap Lam, adjunct professor at the Center for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Ousting Leung would come with risks, Lam said, because Beijing doesn’t want to be seen succumbing to pressure from the streets. A long delay – one of Leung’s predecessors, Tung Chee-Hwa, waited two years after large protests to quit – might, however, cast a shadow over the election of the next chief executive in 2017.
“Beijing doesn’t want any such speculation,” said Ivan Choy, a political scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “They would want him to stay on for one or two years until things settled down. Otherwise, if he’s forced to step down sooner, it would create more trouble for Beijing.”
The timing of the disclosure is raising eyebrows about who leaked the material and the motive behind it.
“These documents weren’t released as we have non-poach and non-compete agreements with some 100 executives, and they’re not published or on-the-record,” UGL Chief Executive Officer Richard Leupen said in an interview. “To our mind, it’s a confidential matter, so it was either taken or leaked out by someone who had access to the information.”
UGL said in a statement the payment was a routine non-compete clause as part of its acquisition of DTZ, a bankrupt real estate consultancy where Leung was a director, shortly before he took office in 2012.
“It’s clearly someone who is trying to damage C.Y. or us. At this point, we don’t know. It could even be a competitor,” Leupen said. “You do wonder why it takes three years to come out.”
John Garnaut, an editor at the Sydney Morning Herald, told the Voice of America that he’d received the documents “out of the blue” from an anonymous source.
“Nobody knows where the leaks are coming from,” said Emily Lau, chairwoman of the Democratic Party. She is calling for Leung’s resignation. “Some say it’s Beijing, some say the Americans. This is speculation about deep, dark secrets. The timing is very intriguing. It comes right at a critical juncture.”
Even with his approval ratings slipping to their second lowest since he took office and tens of thousands of Hong Kongers publicly clamoring for democracy, Leung appears to still have Xi’s support. China’s most senior official in Hong Kong, Zhang Xiaoming, said the payments to Leung were were “common business practice” and he didn’t see “any big problem with it,” The Age newspaper reported.
An even clearer indication of Beijing’s “unwavering support” for Leung came yesterday in a front-page editorial in the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s newspaper.
David Eldon, the Asia-Pacific chairman of HSBC Holdings Plc from 1999 and 2005, said in an e-mail that “the recent payment disclosures, which I am sure were made legally, will create such a fuss that a lot of pressure will be put on the chief executive.”
The Leung report is the latest in a series of unusual events that have hit the two sides of the Hong Kong protests. Opponents of the demonstrations leaked the home address of 18-year-old student leader Joshua Wong. Supporters of the protests posted misleading photos that suggested China was sending in tanks.
Hong Kong police say members of triads, the city’s organized crime gangs, have infiltrated both camps.
As many as 300 people yesterday besieged the printing plant of a Hong Kong newspaper whose owner is an outspoken critic of Beijing and staunch supporter of the protesters, delaying delivery of the Apple Daily and other papers that share its printing press, including the International New York Times.
Leung “is not fighting for us, he is fighting against us,” said Jimmy Lai, chairman of Next Media Animation Ltd. and the paper’s publisher, who has supported the student-led protests for free elections in 2017. Lai was the target of a failed assassination attempt in 2008. In recent months his media empire has been targeted by hackers, including an attack on Oct. 13 that disrupted its website.
He has also been the target of anti-corruption investigations after local newspapers were given leaked company records allegedly documenting undeclared donations to local pro-democracy lawmakers.
The leaks and other tactics are creating an atmosphere of suspicion, Lau said. “People are gathering black propaganda and all those personal files. We are all under political observation. Who we see and what we say. Even now, as I’m talking to you. It’s quite unnerving,” she said. Shai Oster, Bloomberg
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