Jimmy Lai, 78, the Hongkonger who was just sentenced to twenty more years in prison for resisting the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party, may not also have to complete a six-year sentence for alleged fraud.
Lai was convicted on the bogus fraud charge in 2022 (persecution.org, February 28, 2026).
The reprieve provides little reason for him to celebrate, however, as it comes less than two weeks after he was sentenced to 20 years in prison under separate national security-related charges. That sentence is unaffected by this week’s ruling. [Other reports say it’s unclear whether any years will be subtracted from the 20-year sentence if the new ruling stands.] Lai’s daughter, Claire, described this week’s ruling as “nothing more than a PR move” designed to disguise the harsh terms of imprisonment handed down to her father earlier this month.
That 20-year sentence is the longest to date under China’s national security law and essentially constitutes a life sentence for the 78-year-old defendant whose health is reportedly failing under inadequate medical care. His family also reports that authorities are preventing him from practicing his faith.
Lai founded the Apple Daily tabloid in 1995, quickly building it into Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy publication. When Beijing moved to absorb the city into its broader system of communist-driven authoritarianism in 2020, Lai and Apple Daily quickly came under scrutiny, and the paper was shut down in 2021 after Lai and other staff members were arrested.
The Hong Kong government can appeal the overturning of Lai’s fraud conviction, but has not yet said whether it will do so.
The details of the alleged fraud hardly matter except as proof of one more way that the CCP has been determined to persecute him. But CRBC reports that “prosecutors had argued that a consultancy firm Lai ran for personal use occupied space that Apple Daily had leased for publication and printing, breaching the lease with a government-linked company and amounting to a false representation. At trial in 2022, Lai was sentenced to five years and nine months, fined HK$2 million (about US$256,000) and banned from company management for eight years.”
The court that granted Lai’s appeal ruled that the prosecution had “failed to prove that the applicants had made a false representation as alleged.” A former Apple Daily executive also convicted on the charge, Wong Wai-keung, was also cleared—after having completed the entire 21 months of prison to which he had been sentenced.
Perhaps Lai’s appeal is “nothing more than a PR move,” as his daughter suggests. It’s also, if barely, possible that despite the CCP-induced rot in Hong Kong’s judicial system, the judicial deliberation of this particular court was honest and independent. But that it somehow was prevented from ruling much faster.
