Former Hospital Authority exec. convicted of stealing from supermarket denied chance to appeal at top court
Hong Kong Free Press
A former Hospital Authority (HA) executive and her husband, who were convicted of stealing from a supermarket two years ago, have been denied a chance to appeal at the city’s top court.
Vivien Chuang – a former HA chief manager who spoke at a number of Hong Kong’s daily Covid-19 press briefings in 2020 – and her physician husband, Chiu Ming-yu were fined HK$5,000 each after being found guilty of stealing groceries worth HK$1,632.80 from the Aeon supermarket in Whampoa in April 2022.
The two applied for a certificate from the High Court on Wednesday to take their case to the Court of Final Appeal.
Frankie Yiu, deputy judge of the High Court’s Court of First Instance, said Chuang and Chiu had simply repackaged their arguments from the last time they tried to challenge the conviction at the Court of Appeal.
Yiu said the appellants argued that the original judge who found them guilty had mistakenly treated the defendant’s oral confession and supplementary statements as facts.
According to The Witness, during the appeal application last year, also presided over by Yiu, the appellants said police had misled them into confessing by telling them: “Whether you had the intention or not makes no difference, as long as you did not pay and you took [the goods] away from the supermarket, it was theft.”
Yiu said on Wednesday that he had already handled this argument earlier and declined to advance the appeal.
Chuang and Chiu were charged in May 2022 for stealing multiple items from the supermarket, including a watermelon, a honeydew melon, chicken, two boxes of blueberries, and two boxes of sashimi.
During the nine-day trial in 2022 and 2023, the defence said they might have forgotten to pay. Both testified, with Chuang saying she was not focused on checking out the items because she was thinking about work – Hong Kong was battling its fifth Covid-19 wave at the time – and worried about her daughter in mainland China.
She told the court that it was her first weekend off work in months, but she still had some unfinished business.
Chiu said that he was checking his phone for flights to bring their daughter back to Hong Kong, so he was also distracted.
They were found guilty in April 2023. The judge said he did not doubt Chuang and Chiu’s contribution to the community, but that “everybody was equal in the eyes of the law.”
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