Four arrested on money
laundering charges as police shut online platform aimed at helping protesters
Hong Kong police on Thursday
said they had frozen HK$70 million (US$10 million) from a major fund for
donations to help pro-democracy protesters, and arrested its four members for
money laundering.
Police said their
investigation focused on Spark Alliance, a non-profit online platform formed in
2016 that collects donations to provide support to political critics of the
city’s pro-Beijing authorities.
It is one of two crowd-sourced
funding platforms that have collected millions of dollars to provide legal and
other help for people arrested in the pro-democracy protests that have upended
the city since early June.
But police said some of the
donations were allegedly used by the fund owners for other investments.
“We found the donated money
was transferred to a shell company and a significant portion of this money was
invested in personal insurance products,” Senior Superintendent Chan Wai-kei
told reporters.
“The beneficiary of these
products is the person in charge of the shell company.”
Four people aged between 17
and 50 – three men and one woman – were arrested for money laundering,
including the alleged director of the shell company.
Chan did not respond directly
to questions from reporters on whether donating to legal defense funds for
arrested protesters could count as money laundering.
“Money laundering means you
continue to handle the money even when you know it’s gained from unlawful
activities,” he said.
He added people could risk
committing offenses of inciting or facilitating crimes if a person knowingly
financed unlawful activities.
In a statement on its Facebook
page, Spark Alliance described the police’s allegations as “smears.” The fund
said the four arrested had legal representation and it would not comment
further given pending legal proceedings.
Last month, the fund said it
would stop receiving donations to its HSBC account without further explanation.
Semi-autonomous Hong Kong has
been battered by increasingly violent demonstrations in the starkest challenge
the city has presented to Beijing since its 1997 handover from Britain.
Millions have hit the streets
in protests fuelled by years of growing fears that authoritarian China is
stamping out Hong Kong’s liberties.
Police have arrested more than
6,000 people and charged about 1,000 of them, filling the city’s courts with
cases that are likely to last for years.
About 40% of those arrested
are students, some of whom face up to 10 years in jail on rioting charges.
– AFP
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