Lawyers for James Ting, the former Akai Holdings chairman whose conviction for false accounting was overturned last year, argued in court yesterday that prosecutors should not be allowed to rectify the 'deficiencies' of their case with a retrial of the executive.
Mr Ting was convicted on June 29 last year on two counts of false accounting related to an allegedly fictitious purchase of a 50 per cent stake in MicroMain Systems for HK$300 million.
Akai, owned by Mr Ting's Semi-Tech Group, went bankrupt in 2000, owing about HK$8 billion. He was sentenced to six years in jail and banned from being a company director for 12 years.
It was the harshest penalty handed down for a white-collar crime in almost a decade.
Three months later, the Court of Appeal quashed Mr Ting's conviction. It overturned his sentence, lifted the ban on him being a director and ordered a retrial. The appeals court found that prosecutorial errors had caused Judge Clare-Marie Beeson to give misleading directions to the jury.
Yesterday, lawyers for both the defence and prosecution presented arguments to a five-judge panel headed by Chief Justice Andrew Li Kwok-nang on whether Mr Ting should be subject to a retrial. Mr Ting, who is out on bail for HK$5 million cash with a surety of an additional HK$5 million, appeared in court.
