Jake's View | Why go easy on Secretary for Justice Teresa Cheng in illegal structures saga?
Recent events remind one of the Profumo scandal in Britain in the 1960s when too many people offered too many excuses too soon
The basement may not have been revealed because it was not thought necessary, or because of an oversight, or because it did not exist at the time …
Grenville Cross SC,
Former prosecutor,
SCMP, January 19
But, Grenville, if the basement did not exist at the time that the owner of the house, our present Secretary for Justice Teresa Cheng Yeuk-wah took out a mortgage on it, then she herself must have had that basement built.
In that case she certainly would have known it was an illegal structure and there really is no start of an excuse for her.
I do not want to be brutal about these things but recent events in this story remind me of the Profumo scandal in Britain in the 1960s when the war minister, John Profumo, stood accused of sharing the attentions of a prostitute with a Russian intelligence agent and lied about it.
The great and the good of Britain all lined up to say what a nice man Profumo was and he didn’t really mean it and it was all so unfortunate and perhaps we should just give him some time to explain himself.
Likewise, I see a little too much here at the moment of the great and good of Hong Kong lining up too soon to say that we should go easy on Teresa Cheng and maybe she didn’t really know and anyway it’s so hard to find a justice minister these days.
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