Article

Note: Yu Wai Tung, Defendant, along with others, was charged with three counts of conspiracy to defraud several banks while he was employed as financial controller for Keep Mount Holdings Limited and Ultragrace Limited.

Count 1 involved four LCs, applied for and obtained by Ultragrace, issued by the Kwangtung Provincial Bank, the Bank of Communications, and the Kincheng Bank Corporation in favor of Keep Mount totaling HK$30.985 million (US$4 million).

Count 2 involved nine LCs, applied for and obtained by Ultragrace, issued by Kwangtung Provincial Bank, the Bank of Communications and the Bank of China, in favor of Commercial Power Investment Limited. Count 2 also involved five LCs applied for and obtained by Commercial Power, issued by the same banks, in favor of Ultragrace. The 14 LCs in count 2 totaled HK$50,804,647 (US$6,560,000).

Count 3 involved four LCs, applied for and obtained by Ultragrace, issued by the Bank of Communications in favor of C & W Development Limited, totaling HK$20.794 million (US$2.684 million).

In all 22 LCs, the underlying transactions were bogus, documents submitted for application and draw were false, and in all cases the beneficiaries refunded all proceeds from the LCs to their respective applicants.

Defendant was acquitted at trial of count 1, and convicted counts 2 and 3, for which he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Defendant applied for leave of appeal against the conviction chiefly on the ground that since evidence for all three counts came principally from the testimony of a single witness, insufficiency of evidence for count 1 should cause counts 2 and 3 to also fail. In dismissing Defendant's application, the High Court of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Court of Appeal, Woo, JA., cited the testimony from the trial, noting that because of differing dates of the three counts and differing dates of employment of Defendant and the witness, the trial jury had rightly considered the counts separately and weighed testimony separately for each count.

[JEB/ees]

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