He was an investor who last year agreed to cover expenses of Causeway Bay shop and who shared a dinner on night publisher disappeared
PHILA SIU AND OLIVER CHOU
UPDATED : Sunday, 27 March, 2016, 12:58am
Lee Po in Hong Kong
Cross-border intrigue over bookseller Lee Po has taken a new twist with the apparent unmasking of a mystery man in dark glasses who accompanied him back to the mainland less than 24-hours after he dramatically resurfaced in Hong Kong on Friday.
Woo Chih-wai, who worked with Lee at the now defunct Causeway Bay bookstore at the heart of the story, identified him as Chan Hin-shing, an investor in the store with whom he had dinner on the night the bookseller first disappeared.
Woo, 75, said he was sure it was Chan, an investor who injected cash into the struggling Causeway Bay Books just over a month before Lee vanished from Hong Kong in December.
“From the television footage, I recognised that the man is Chan Hin-shing, the man who had dinner with me the night when Lee Po went missing,” Woo told the Sunday Morning Post yesterday.
The Post could not independently confirm that the man was Chan, but Woo said: “I am 100 per cent sure it’s him.”
Woo worked at the bookstore – which specialised in publications critical of China’s leaders – for two months until Lee disappeared on December 30. He said he had often seen Chan, a Hong Kong resident, in the store.
On November 13 last year, Lee signed an agreement with Chan, letting him run the shop for six months until May 13, according to Woo. Chan would cover operating costs and pay the HK$39,000 monthly rent. Lee needed someone to bear the costs as the store was losing HK$20,000 a month.
Woo recalled that Chan was “acting strange” the day Lee went missing. Before that, Chan would spend only a few minutes at the store when he visited, but on the day Lee vanished, Chan turned up to ask Woo’s advice on how to make the store profitable again.
Chan told Woo he wanted to have dinner with both Woo and Lee that night.
In hindsight, Woo said, he wondered if Chan did that to keep him at the bookstore so he would not go to the Chai Wan warehouse, where Lee was last seen before disappearing and later turning up on the mainland.
In October last year, five associates from the Mighty Current publishing house and Causeway Bay Books went missing one after another. Lee’s disappearance sparked fears that he had been kidnapped and spirited across the border by Chinese agents.
On Thursday, Lee came back to the city and asked the police to scrap their investigation into his missing-person case, categorically denying he had been abducted or forced to do anything against his will.
Chased by a media pack on Friday outside his North Point flat, Lee was escorted by the mystery man into a vehicle with cross-border licence plates. The vehicle left the city through the Lok Ma Chau control point in the morning.
Local media reports linked the car, through its plates, to a former member of China’s top political advisory body, but there was no official confirmation.
National People’s Congress Standing Committee member Rita Fan Hsu Lai-tai said yesterday there was no evidence to suggest Lee was lying about his situation, despite the disbelief his story had been met with.
“I don’t see any evidence which can prove that mainland agents have carried out duties in Hong Kong,” she said.
Democratic Party founding chairman Martin Lee Chu-ming said it appeared that the mainland authorities had asked Lee to come back to Hong Kong and return to the mainland.
“The Hong Kong government must continue to investigate – even if Lee Po and his family are satisfied,” he said.
“This is a very serious issue for Hong Kong.”
Additional reporting by Stuart Lau
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/1931067/colleague-lee-po-reveals-identity-mystery-man-who
