Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai admits meetings with Pence, Pompeo ‘kind of’ lobbying
Ex-owner of Apple Daily says he supported sanctions against officials who ‘suppressed Hong Kong’ but not those against ‘China as a state’
Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai Chee-ying entered his sixth day of oral testimony on Thursday at West Kowloon Court as the judges looked at his meetings with a prosecution witnesses in relation to national security charges levelled against the former media mogul.
Lai, 77, has pleaded not guilty to two charges of conspiring to collude with foreign forces under the 2020 security law, as well as a third count of conspiracy to print and distribute seditious publications in breach of colonial-era legislation.
On Wednesday, the fifth day of the ex-mogul’s oral testimony, the court read from an Apple Daily article which said Lai had suggested the United States sanction mainland Chinese and Hong Kong officials who had suppressed the 2019 protest movement in a meeting with former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
Lai said there was “no reason to doubt the accuracy” of the article but he did not recall mentioning sanctions in the meeting.
His lawyers spent the rest of Wednesday’s hearing on the meetings between Lai and paralegal Wayland Chan Tsz-wah, who became a prosecution witness after pleading guilty to colluding with foreign forces.
Lai said his impression of Chan was that he was “a young man at the frontier” and “conservative”, and he first met him with the purpose of conveying to the “violent people on the front” that their actions were damaging to the anti-government movement.
The court continued to look into Lai’s third meeting with Chan on Thursday.
