The deal that could let Hong Kong banker turned sex-murderer Rurik Jutting go back to Britain

He was single, super-intelligent and earning enough money that if he wanted it, he bought it. They were so desperate that they sold themselves to him – and paid with their lives.

Double sex-murderer Rurik Jutting – the Bank of America-Merrill-Lynch investment banker from comfortable middle England who was jailed for life by a Hong Kong court on November 8 – turned inhumanity into a sick art-form for the digital age when he tortured 23-year-old Sumarti Ningsih, 23, and Seneng Mujiasih, 26, from Indonesia, then cut their throats before recording his thoughts about what he had done on his mobile phone.

His defence against murder was to seek a lesser manslaughter charge on the grounds his judgement had been substantially impaired at the time of the crimes by cocaine and alcohol. In other words, ‘the drugs and booze made me do it’. But the jury weren’t fooled and neither was the judge, Mr Justice Stuart-Moore, who rejected out of hand Jutting’s self-important post-sentencing statement to the court about the “evil” he had done. “Let no one be fooled by the defendant’s superficial charm. He has not shown a shred of remorse,” the judge said.

Watch: Rurik Jutting is haunting me - Sumarti Ningsih’s chilling call to father days before death

But Jutting wasn’t finished, the 31-year-old Briton whose mother was born in Hong Kong, then announced his intention to apply – as is his legal right – to serve his sentence in England under the Transfer of Sentenced Persons Agreement that Hong Kong signed with Britain a year after the 1997 handover.

Stuart-Moore said he would make sure “the English authorities will know the exact type of person they will have to deal with”, describing the murders as “one of the most horrifying cases” tried in Hong Kong courts. “There are insufficient superlatives to describe the cruelty he’s done to Sumarti Ningsih and Seneng Mujiasih,” he concluded.

Rurik Jutting: how the fate of a jailed psychopath raises questions about free will

New figures obtained by This Week in Asia reveal that if – and it is a big if – the application by Jutting is successful, he will be the first convicted murderer to be transferred out of the Hong Kong penal system. A flight home and perhaps an escape from a prison that, however secure, cannot keep out the sounds, smells and sights of the city that remind him – and others – of his horrific crimes.

Such transfers are carried out under bilateral Transfer of Sentenced Persons agreements which Hong Kong has signed with 15 countries and Macau since 1997.

Transfer applications usually come from prisoners serving long sentences and the general principle behind them is that a transfer will aid a convicted person’s ability to rehabilitate by placing them in a more familiar environment with access to their relatives.

But while the intention of the agreements may be laudable, the figures reveal that the implementation is anything but.