Lai’s daughter Claire described the ruling on Thursday as “nothing more than a PR move by the Hong Kong authorities”.<\/p>\n
“No one should be fooled into thinking.. [it] is anything more,” she told the BBC.<\/p>\n
“The rule of law is broken there, and my father is still unjustly imprisoned and will remain so for nearly 20 years unless urgent action is taken to secure his release.”<\/p>\n
Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, who leads Lai’s international legal team, echoed this, saying the decision “changes nothing” and that Lai risks dying in prison because of ill health.<\/p>\n
“No one should be fooled into thinking that this fraud appeal belatedly succeeding suggests the Hong Kong system operates fairly or justly,” she told the BBC.<\/p>\n
In 1995, Lai founded Apple Daily, a local tabloid that was critical of Beijing and became Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy paper. The paper was shuttered in 2021<\/a> after Lai and other key staff members were arrested.<\/p>\n The paper was at the heart of Lai’s fraud trial. Prosecutors argued that Lai breached lease terms by allowing his private consultancy firm to operate in office space that Apple Daily had rented.<\/p>\n Wong Wai-keung, a former executive at Lai’s media company, was also charged in the same case and jailed for 21 months.<\/p>\n Critics say Lai’s trials and detention are a sign of the shrinking civil liberties in Hong Kong, especially after the introduction of a Beijing-imposed national security law.<\/p>\n This month, the UK and the US governments said the national security law has been used to “silence” activists like Lai.<\/p>\n But Beijing and Hong Kong authorities have argued that the law is necessary to maintain stability and deny it has weakened the territory’s freedoms as a semi-autonomous region of China. <\/p>\n