Phoenix Lam raises questions in wake of allegations against bookseller father while insisting he is ‘just talking about T-shirts’
PHILA.SIU@SCMP.COM
UPDATED : Thursday, 07 July, 2016, 2:30pm
Phoenix Lam, son of bookseller Lam Wing-kee. Photo: SCMP Pictures
The son of Causeway Bay bookseller Lam Wing-kee has questioned how a Hong Kong-registered company with no offices outside the city could be considered an illegal business operation for sending commodities across the border.
Phoenix Lam raised the matter on his Facebook page on Wednesday after mainland authorities said his father could be liable for engaging in an illegal business exceeding 400,000 yuan (HK$465,000) for mailing banned books to the mainland from Hong Kong.
“I actually don’t understand,” the younger Lam wrote. “Under ‘one country, two systems’, a legally registered company in Hong Kong ... with no offices, points of sale and warehouses in other countries, how could it be considered an illegal business operation?”
He then went on to use the US, instead of the mainland, as an example as he posed more questions.
Lam asked if taking online orders and shipping T-shirts and handbags he had designed to the US would be considered illegal.
“Does the US have laws that state clearly what items can’t be mailed into the country?” he asked.
“If we’re just talking about a staff member from our company, not a shareholder, who was instructed to mail the T-shirts, would that be a crime? What crime would it be?”
He added: “If it is a crime to mail T-shirts through the post office in Hong Kong, shouldn’t the relevant departments from the foreign governments state this and give warnings beforehand that it is illegal to mail T-shirts there?”
He wrote that he was just talking about T-shirts and nothing else.
Lam’s father made explosive revelations last month about how he had been abducted by the mainland’s secretive central investigative unit while crossing the border to Shenzhen last October.
The bookseller said he was allowed to return to Hong Kong on the condition that he took a hard disk containing customer information back to the mainland authorities.
He eventually decided to go public about his detention and eight months of “mental torture”.
Earlier this week, Chinese public security chiefs warned that the bookseller could face tougher legal action for skipping bail and refusing to return to the mainland.
The Public Security Bureau of Ningbo, where Lam was detained for several months, said the “compulsory measures” against him could be tightened.
Under mainland law, the most serious form of “compulsory measures” is arrest, although the lack of an extradition treaty between the two sides would make that unlikely.
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/1986624/lam-wing-kees-son-asks-facebook-mailing-items-hong-kong
