Le Conseil des Etats a voté lundi soir une motion qui appelle à créer un organe de surveillance des investissements étrangers. La Chambre basse se saisira de cet objet à l’automne. En attendant, le gouvernement et Economiesuisse confirment leur opposition
Source : https://www.letemps.ch/economie/suisse-divisee-un-barrage-contre-capitaux-chinois
A Hong Kong activist convicted of divulging details of a corruption investigation into a former government official lost an appeal against his sentence on Wednesday, with the judge saying his actions were not in the public interest but served only to raise his reputation.
Chairman of the League of Social Democrats Avery Ng Man-yuen was sentenced to four months in prison for revealing the investigation into former permanent secretary for home affairs Betty Fung Ching Suk-yee in 2016.
Ng was sent to jail immediately, although his lawyer said they intended to apply for bail pending his final appeal later.
Ng, 41, revealed on social media and to reporters that Fung – who held her former post between July 2014 and March last year – was under scrutiny by the Independent Commission Against Corruption after he reported her.
He invited the press and posted pictures on his Facebook page when he was invited to ICAC’s office to give a witness testimony as a complainant.
The Eastern magistrate found him guilty of three counts of disclosing the identity of individuals being investigated, an offence which carries a maximum jail sentence of one year and a HK$20,000 (US$2,555) fine.
Ng admitted revealing the details, but argued it was in the public interest, a defence the trial judge rejected.
High Court judge Mrs Justice Judianna Barnes, who heard his appeal, ruled on Thursday she did not see a connection between the public interest and Ng taking photographs of the ICAC office.
“His move was obviously to raise his reputation,” said the judge of the activist.
The judge said Ng lacked genuine remorse to merit a community service order.
For sentencing, Barnes said Ng lacked the genuine remorse to merit a community service order. Nor did she find a four-month jail sentence excessive.
The investigation centred on a conflict of interest between Fung and her husband and a businesswoman over certain properties.
The trial, involving her husband Wilson Fung Wing-yip and Cheyenne Chan Ung-iok, the sister-in-law of gaming tycoon Stanley Ho Hung-sun, is currently under way. Fung has not been charged with any crime.
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The trial court heard that after Ng had filed his complaint, an ICAC investigator reminded him not to disclose any details when he was invited to make a statement at the commission’s North Point headquarters. But Ng revealed the meeting on his social media accounts.
The investigator then changed the time and location of the interview to Yau Ma Tei. But when Ng was giving a statement, he posted on various social media accounts: “Making statement at ICAC”, “A thousand people and I had low popularity. It’s time for me to promote my page” and “Very boring. Have waited for a long time”.
The posts included a selfie with an ICAC logo in one of the interview rooms.
Ng was cleared on appeal in March of throwing a tuna sandwich in the direction of former chief executive Leung Chun-ying during a protest in September 2016.
Ng, a comrade of radical activist “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung, failed to win a seat at the last two Legco elections.
When photos of Huawei Technologies founder Ren Zhengfei showing journalists around his office began to circulate this week, there was a book on his desk that caught the eye of the Chinese internet community. The tome, a Chinese translation of Le Piège Américain, or The American Trap, was written by Frenchman Frederic Pierucci, a former executive with French rail transport company Alstom, about his five-year-long tussle with the US Department of Justice.
The American Trap, which was released in France in January, was the top-selling business management book on JD.com and No 1 new title on Dangdang.com, two popular Chinese e-commerce sites. The book, written with journalist Matthieu Aron, goes on sale in Hong Kong on Friday.
The book has captured the imagination of Chinese readers because it mirrors in some ways what happened to Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, who was detained in Vancouver on December 1 and is out on bail and facing extradition to the US on allegations of helping defraud banks to circumvent US sanctions on Iran.
Pierucci was arrested as he disembarked from a Cathay Pacific flight in New York in 2013. He pleaded guilty to charges of authorising bribes to Indonesian officials to win a boiler plant order, under an anti-corruption law that allowed the US to pursue cases overseas if the transaction was made in US dollars or email had passed through US servers.
Pierucci ended up serving two years in prison in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and was also put on parole for three years. He claims that the anti-corruption investigation was motivated by the US helping General Electric in its acquisition of Alstom’s energy business. Pierucci now advises companies on their anti-corruption policies.
In an interview with the South China Morning Post from Paris, Pierucci said that Europe was previously a big target of America’s extraterritorial laws, while China is the next target, citing the cases of Huawei and ZTE Corp as examples. Huawei was added to a US trade blacklist this month, prohibiting it from doing business with American companies without permission under a “presumption of denial”.
