tim's experiment

Well I’m glad I was not the only one who thought that the imposition of ten-year jail sentences on small potatoes convicted of participating in money laundering was Draconian and excessive.
In Sunday’s Post a senior criminal lawyer ventured the polite comment that the present law makes it easy to prosecute people and hard to defend them. The problem is that the Organised and Serious Crimes Ordinance makes it an offence to deal in property “knowing or having reasonable grounds to believe” that it is the proceeds of an indictable offence. Prosecutors have been having an easy time persuading courts that money with no known antecedents should have been regarded by the accused (in one case a 61-year-old housewife and in another a 22-year-old middle school drop-out) as providing  reasonable grounds to believe it was the proceeds of a serious crime merely because it was being laundered. The prosecution does not have to prove that a crime has taken place, or that the money was the proceeds of it.
In response we had Mr Kevin Zervos, the Director of Public Prosecutions, whose minions no doubt take a pride in the forensic excellence that allows them to send elderly ladies to prison for 10 years. Mr Zervos illustrated the interesting legal skill of missing the point when it is not helpful to your side of the argument. The law was justified because “we are dealing with proceeds of serious crime”, he said. But that is exactly what the prosecution does not have to prove. Actually there are a number of reasons not involving serious crimes which might lead people to launder money in Hong Kong, perhaps the most obvious possibility being to get round regulations in some other places which forbid people from taking their money out of the country, whether it is the product of serious crime, honest toil or luck.
There are a number of other problems with using this part of the Organised and Serious Crimes Ordinance against nobodies who move money for other people. One is that there have been a number of high-profile cases internationally in which big banks admitted money-laundering on an epic scale. Yet somehow no banker winds up behind bars on these occasions.
Another problem is that while the old lady in the street can get 10 years for money laundering through the use — or abuse — of a law intended for major criminals, the bank or money changer caught providing this service will probably be prosecuted under the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing (Financial Institutions) Ordinance. The maximum penalty under this ordinance is jail for seven years.
A further problem, from the point of view of the non-lawyer surveying this scene, is that some very large loopholes remain unplugged. People can still buy flats, no questions asked, with suitcases full of cash. There is some reason for supposing that the willingness of buyers to pay stupid prices for Hong Kong flats is due to the SAR’s willingness to accommodate money which might otherwise be trapped in the mainland. Similarly, cash betting at Jockey Club facilities is subject to no checks and large wagers are welcome.
Or of course you can go to Macau…

Naturally we are all against serious crime. But most people do not regard moving shy money as a serious crime in itself. The prosecutorial authorities might usefully spend more time on the pursuit of serious criminals. Failure to ask where money came from should be regarded as an infringement of procedure, like putting a false address on your company registration form. I notice not one of the well-publicised examples of this offence has been prosecuted yet. Department of Justice too busy beating up old ladies, no doubt.

What would this interesting eyesore be, plonked into the middle of my morning walk? This is a large object. It is taller than I am. It is a monkey trap. Evidently intended for rather large monkeys.

We have always had occasional visits from monkeys becausc we live close to the edge of a country park. Monkey herds which usually prowl well-known visitor spots like the Shing Mun Reservoir or the Old Taipo Road can visit us without crossing any roads. They usually come once a year. I suppose – because monkeys are said to be good at this sort of thing – that some local tree reaches an edible stage and the monkeys stay long enough to strip it. This year for some reason they hung around a bit longer. My suspicion is that they found another source of food … like an insecure dustbin. But I may be doing my neighbours an injustice. Perhaps some shift in monkey territories elsewhere has made our locality more attractive.

Anyway for some reason the monkeys made a few return visits. They certainly on one occasion explored the Clubhouse roof. Rumour in our estate has it that one domestic helper had to shoo a monkey out of the kitchen where she was working. Then the monkeys went again. We have not seen them for weeks.

Meanwhile, however, the bureaucratic wheels were turning. It seems that people who wish to complain about monkeys address themselves to the Agriculture and Fisheries Department. I am not sure why. Monkeys are not agricultural in the usual sense and they are certainly not fish.  Weeks after the last monkey had disappeared the department produced the eyesore, which is clearly labelled as a monkey trap.

This is an imposing piece of machinery, apparently operated hy electricity. It has a sort of double-ended arrangement. There appear to be two gates which close in the middle, so that unwary m0nkeys caught in one end can watch while other simian suckers are caught in the other. But the gates have been fixed open with ziptapes, so I suppose this is now just one big sociable trap with two entrances. I do not think the monkeys actually used this part of the path, but the trap is an awkward monstrosity moved on eight small wheels. More plausible monkey haunts like woods and hillsides are clearly beyond it.

Further doubts about the effectiveness of the machine are raised by the absence of bait. Soon after the trap first appeared it was visited by an AFD team in a van, who threw a load of fruit in it. Over the ensuing week, though, this was gratefully consumed by small animals and insects unthreatened by the trap. So it is now empty. Only a terminally stupid monkey will ever go in it.

Unfortunately this is not the end of the matter. I do not object to the trap because it is ugly, though it is. Nor am I concerned that it will not catch many monkeys, though I shall be surprised if it catches any. I do object that it is dangerous. This is not my view alone: the labels on the machine itself say that it is dangerous. But there it sits, a mere ten yards from the busy footpath which connects the local public car park with the Lions’ Lookout, a small tourist attraction but one which produces a steady stream of visitors. The area is much frequented by unleashed children and dogs. They are more likely to end up in the trap than any monkey. The department has in the past deployed smaller traps which could be put on hill-sides and behind fences. The monstrosity should be removed.

A nasty little accident occurred on the op-ed page of the Post on Thursday morning. The scene of the mishap was a rather long opinion piece called Smart Thinking. It was illustrated with a picture of a thoughtful looking young lady wearing an academic gown and holding out one of those flat hats that people wear at graduation ceremonies. I am not sure if she is supposed to be thinking or begging. If the latter this was an entertaining comment on the article.

The piece was written by one Paul Yip, who is a professor of Social Work and Social Administration (it is difficult to get academics to make choices) at the University of Hong Kong. The burden of the piece was rather unsurprising. Higher Education, like many other industries in Hong Kong, supposes it would be in the public interest if more public money was thrown at it. Since Mr Tsang had unaccountably failed to hose gold in the general direction of local universities when he had the opportunity to do so in the recent budget, he had missed an opportunity.

So here we have a professor at our premier university waving his credentials and starting the article like this: “As an alumni of the University of Melbourne…” As an alumni? Alumni is a Latin word. It is a plural. The singular is “alumnus”. The whole set is carefully documented on the parts of the internet where language pedants gather. Alumnus is the masculine singular, alumna the feminine singular, and alumnae the feminine plural. Whether the masculine plural, alumni, is acceptable for a group of graduates of both sexes is a matter of some squabbling in America.

It would I suppose be grossly unfair these days to berate a professor – especially a professor of social work – for not knowing his Latin. One can though, I think, complain that professors, like other writers, should not use a language if they do not understand it. “Alumni” is unnecessary. “Graduate” or “former student” will do just as well, and reduce the risk of looking pretentious.

I have not been a great fan of John Tsang’s budgets: turgid hymns to prodence whose inability to predict the future even a year ahead have become legendary. Still we must recognise merit where merit appears, and Mr Tsang’s announcement that he was a member of the middle classes caused more hilarity chez Hamlett than any previous FS has managed.

The claim is of course absurd. Mr Tsang, if you count his fringe benefits and pension rights, must be wallowing in something over half a million dollars a month, But his explanation was interesting. He thought he was middle class, apparently, because he had the classic symptoms of middle class status: the willingness to watch French films and a taste for coffee. This is interesting but betrays a fundamental flaw in Mr Tsang’s reasoning. There are, after all, two boundaries to the Middle Class. There is the one you cross when you enter it from the bottom and the one you cross when you exit it upwards. Or, in due course, when your fortunes decline, the one you later cross downwards.

A variety of definitions have been offered based simply on money. For example, you can consider the bottom 25 per cent of income recipients as the grassroots, the top 25 per cent as the toffs, and the middle class as the 50 per cent left between these two extremes. None of these statistical interpretations is any help to Mr Tsang, who is certainly, if income is the sole criteria, firmly in the upper ranks.

If you look at it as a matter of culture and habits, the Continental films and Starbucks coffee criteria are probably a pretty good stab at the bottom boundary. No horny-handed worker is going to waste his scarce leisure on films with subtitles, or his hard-earned cash on luxurious lattes. One could offer other tests: pedigree pets, a German car, a private doctor or an overseas education for the kids. This is an entertaining game. But it does not help Mr Tsang because his problem is not that he is a grassroot, but that he is an expensive orchid.

In traditional Hong Kong, according to C Northcote Parkinson, the point at which a businessman became a blossom was clearly marked. As his business grew he would stay for years in the hovel from which he started it – the squatter hut or the cockloft over the shop – until he passed the Hound Barrier. At this point he would move into a detached house in Kowloon Tong with a high wall and a guard dog.  We can bring this observation up to date by adding to the high wall and guard dog a large illegal basement. This progress can be contrasted with the less clear situation in Western countries, where people generally upgrade their lifestyle gradually as they get richer.

For modern circumstances it is difficult to find as crisp an indicator that a person has passed out of the middle classes and gone on to higher things. But not impossible. Clearly when a person starts owning real property in Hong Kong which he has no intention of living in then the person concerned has moved into what the rest of us must regard as the financial stratosphere. Mr Tsang is apparently the proprietor of enough property to furnish a small village. As this seems to be true of everyone else in the ruling circle we must expect that their efforts to rein in property prices will be … well, prudent.

I owe Hong Kong architects a profound apology. Over the years I have been pretty rude about Hong Kong architecture. Most Hong Kong buildings are carefully dssigned to maximise the owner’s income or profit. The architect is too busy exploring plot ratio loopholes to worry about the eventual appearance of the result. When something more interesting is attempted it is usually either boring or derivative or both. Sites with great potential are squandered: the Convention Centre looks like the Sydney Opera House would have looked if it was designed by a committee; the Art Museum looks like a giant public toilet; the new Government offices … Well you see the point. However, last weekend I went to Macau for the first time since, I think, about 1990. A great deal has happened to Macau since then, most of it bad. The city now offers a chance to recalibrate your assessments of architecture. Architecture does not have to be boring. It can be ostentatiously hideous.

We played at the Venetian (music, not at the tables) which I found quite acceptable as casino resorts go. If you are going to copy an alien and historic style then Venetian republican is not a bad choice. The curious thing was that having been to the Venetian first, walking round the old parts of Macau was disconcerting. The ground floors are occupied by retail outlets from the usual suspects – much the same gang as those found round the Venetian’s fake Grand Canal. The upper floors are in Macau antique and they all look freshly painted. The result is that you could be back in the Venetian, though in Macau proper you do get a real sky.

I noticed that the old Lisboa rotunda had miraculously survived. It used to be a by-word for over-blown ostentation. In its present company it looks a model of dignified restraint. The outstanding eyesore is the new building just behind it, a sort of multi-storey gold eruption. I am not sure what the shape is supposed to be. From the direction of Taipa it looks rather like one of the pawn shop signs of which Macau has so many, gathered in vulture flocks round the casinos. I suppose a reminder that the house always wins in the long run could be considered a public-spirited feature in a town devoted to gambling, but I can’t believe they intended it to be the first thing people would notice.

The other thing which has changed about Macau is that it was full of mainlanders. Well this was quite close to the Golden Week holiday, but still … Outside of the businesses which they staff, Macau people seemed as rare as native Americans on the streets of Detroit. This is what the Tourism Authority is working so hard to bring to  us here in Hong Kong. Oh dear. I have seen the future and it sucks.

The news that Mr CY Leung has threatened to sue a newspaper columnist raises a number of interesting questions.

The first one is what is all the official nonsense about Mr Leung suing in his private capacity? Senior government officials do not have a private capacity. They are required to seek the permission of the government before taking action of this kind. This restriction may be among those rules which somehow do not apply to the Chief Executive, but if that is the case it would still be a good idea of he behaved as if it did.

The second is why he is making such a fuss. Apparently the burden of the column complained of was that Mr Leung was linked – presumably via the Crazy Bear – with triads. But this is hardly controversial, let alone defamatory. Many senior triads run legitimate businesses as well as their more nefarious ones. Having never been convicted of anything they are free to play the role of public spirited members of the community, including running for election. Everyone knows who they are – Tuen Mun and Wanchai are said to have good representation; Mong Kok, when it was a separate board, was said to enjoy a majority. The Heung Yee Kuk is also said to be well connected. Now psychologists have determined that normal people generally run to about 40 acquaintances whom they keep in touch with more or less continuously. But some professions – journalists, insurance salesmen – run to much larger figures. Politicians are in this category. If we conservatively put the number of contacts per politician at about 100, this means that the contacts of your contacts will number !0,000. Clearly you cannot vet them all. Equally clearly some of them will probably be less than salubrious. This is normal. It is a non-story.

This brings us to the question why Mr Leung bothered. Threatening to sue columnists has costs. Some people, of whom I am one, will see it as a shameless attempt to inhibit comment. Reporters as a group will think less favourably of him, and the general public will not be too impressed either. After all the services of a libel lawyer are like Mr Leung’s palace on the Peak – beyond the means of many of us.

The thing which puzzles me is that Mr Leung was presumably advised that to have any hope of success he must convince the judge that he is a man of unblemished reputation whose good name has been dragged in the mud. But Mr Leung is not such a person. He is routinely described, even in the most sobre newspapers, as a bare-faced liar who got his job by deceiving the electorate. Nobody has been threatened with legal action over these remarks. The defendant could mount the unusual and interesting defence that Mr Leung’s reputation was already so tatty that stories of  him taking tea with triads could make it no worse.

Actually I seem to remember that around 1997 the official line in pro-China circles about organised crime was that many of its leaders were patriots. Presumably they now qualify as persons with the interests of Hong Kong and the motherland at heart, as long as they make no trouble and vote for the Liaison Office’s preferred candidates.  Probably not much consolation when they smash your kneecaps, but politics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows.

A really surprising and unexpected thing happened the other day. I read a piece about the Lion Rock Institute and thoroughly agreed with it. The Lion Rockers are a bunch of free market fundamentalists usually found defending the rights of employers and landlords to grind the faces of the poor if that is the way the economic forces waft them. However their line on the baby-milk problem seemed to me entirely correct. They pointed out that it was perfectly legal for people who wished to do so to buy baby formula in Hong Kong, take it to Shenzhen and sell it there. This is, indeed, a version of an activity commonly found in Hong Kong business circles. It’s called trade. If this particular trade was causing problems – congestion, local shortages, whatever – the job of the government was to solve the problems, not to ban the activity or try to hamper it with regulations.

As it happened a newspaper letter-writer had made a rather similar point a few days before. It would make more sense, he said, for the government to set up a depot where a copious supply of milk powder in the demanded brands could be collected, and then tell the traders to confine themselves to the first carriage of the train, so that other passengers would not be disturbed by them. This would solve the congestion and supply problems, while allowing the trade to continue.

But this, of course, is not the way our government works. Whether this is a colonial tradition or the result of the new prominence of DAB stalwarts I do not know, but the government’s first instinct on facing a problem is to find someone it can bully. Consider the matter of mainland mothers. There is nothing wrong with mainland mothers coming to Hong Kong to give birth. A territory which seriously wished to become a “hub” for medical services would welcome the development. Instead we banish the customers. This was not inevitable. The government could have rented an empty hotel and turned into a maternity home, to increase the supply of beds. More entertainingly it could have chartered an ocean liner for the same purpose. The ocean liner could work like a casino ship. Every evening it would sail out of Hong Kong waters, thereby ensuring that the babies born in it would not have the right of abode, and the doctors working in it could be recruited without the consent of the local closed medical shop. I do not suggest that these solutions would have been easy or infallible. But I do not believe they were even considered. Much easier to bully some pregnant peasants.

Faced with jams in the Cross-Harbour Tunnel we find a similar lack of enterprise. The government will manipulate the charges and bribe the Eastern tunnel company to behave itself this time. Last time they put the Causeway Bay charge up the Eastern people promptly raised their fess to get us back to stage one. Now I realise this is a tricky problem and not the government’s fault. For a long time I was puzzled by the refusal to try to make the Western tunnel more usable. I understand there is only one lane connecting the tunnel to Central but some people might wish to go the other way, to Aberdeen. But I tried that the other day and it’s even worse than going to Central. You are guided by the signs through an intricate web of Kennedy Town streets with several traffic lights before you emerge blinking on Pokfulam Road. So what it comes to is that the Colonial government built a three-lane tunnel which connects with one-and-a-half lanes of  road on Hong Kong side. Clearly this was a planning cock-up on the grand scale, worthy of comparison with the efforts of the nameless mandarin who decided in the 70s that the KCR did not need a station in Tsimshatsui. Still, the tunnel problem is not insoluble. What we need is for the tunnel companies to copy the system surreptitiously used by the airlines and pool their income. This would mean that whichever tunnel you went through the money would be put in a big pot and divided three ways between the tunnel companies. Charges could then be set in a way which reflected the public interest and ensured that all tunnels made the best contribution they could. The tunnels could then save a lot of money by collecting tolls in one direction only. And drivers could choose their tunnel in the light of the length of the detour involved in an alternative and the likelihood of delays on the shortest route.

The puzzling thing is that some people are bullied while others are cossetted. In most countries the idea of paying the owners of antiquated diesel vehicles to get new ones would be greeted with bewilderment. People are not entitled to pollute. London had diesel taxis for years and they did not contribute to pollution because they had serious annual inspections and a compulsory retirement age, which was five years.  Someone who is driving a 15-year-old truck is killing us. Poisonous antiques should be banned.  There is a place for market forces and there is a place for compulsion. It is not clear that our government knows where those places are.

I have occasionally wondered if Hong Kong might be best described as ruled by the rich and for the rich. The truth is perhaps worse. The latest proposed change to the law governing limited companies suggests we are ruled by criminals for criminals.

The idea that company directors should be able to conceal their names from inquirers stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of limited companies. That purpose is to allow people to do business without the risk of having their entire property seized by creditors if a deal goes awry. In other words the purpose of a limited company is to allow people to run up debts which they may not be able to repay. It is not only unnecessary but unconscionable that people enjoying this privilege should also be able to conceal their identities. I notice that there has been no talk of allowing people to remain anonymous if they trade under other names without forming companies. The Register of Business Names will presumably remain public. It would serve no useful purpose if it was not. The registers of doctors and lawyers will remain public. People can also consult the Societies Register to fund out who is behind harmless recreational clubs. It is entirely right and proper that anyone who is interested in the affairs of Dubious Enterprises Ltd should be able to find out who its directors really are. Nobody is forced to become a company director. Shy people can trade on their own account.

Whatever the merits of this argument, though, the scandal pales by the revelation (thank you Ming Pao) that the 16-member committee which approved the innovation included no less than 12 people who were company directors, every one of whom had in defiance of the law registered a bogus address as his home. The form they fill in requires a home address. It seems local businessmen, at least in Legco circles, prefer to put the address of an office or factory. This is a disgraceful episode. Come on you legislators! Does the phrase “conflict of interest” ring a bell somewhere? You were not put in that chamber to legalise your own crimes. Will we now hear from all those people who were pushing for Long Hair to be drummed out of Legco after his conviction for disrupting a bogus consultation meeting? Can we rename the committee concerned the Nameless and Shameless Committee?

All this has given rise to some interesting discussion of the status of that Hong Kong basic item, the ID card number. Of course when ID cards were introduced we were told that only the police would have the right to demand a look at one. Naturally, as was predicted at the time, once it was known that everyone had an ID card, all sorts of people arrogated to themselves the right to look at it. And they frequently make a note of the number. It is a good point, though, that the number as such tells people nothing, or almost nothing, about you. It does not incorporate your nationality, religion, appearance or sexual preferences. All it does is to give you a unique identity in a town with a shortage of different personal names. Connoisseurs may be able to tease a few fragments of Immigration information from the numbers and letters, but for most of us it is just like a human number plate. It is not, and is not supposed to be, like a PIN. So here we go: mine is XD680118(3). Although personally I think bloggers should be allowed to remain anonymous, if they desire it.