Hong Kong’s pro-democracy media tycoon, Jimmy Lai, was sentenced to five years and nine months in jail for fraud after being convicted of breaching a lease contract for his newspaper’s headquarters.
Lai was found guilty of violating the terms of a lease for the headquarters of the now-defunct pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily after concealing the operations of Dico Consultants Ltd. between April 1998 to May 2020.
The court disqualified Lai from being a company director for eight years and fined him HK$2 million ($256, 873).
It also sentenced was Wong Wai-keung, administrative director of Apple Daily’s parent company Next Digital, to 21 months for fraud. Both Lai and Wong pleaded not guilty to their charges….