HKFP reports…
Peggy Wong has stepped down from the Tai Po District Council for health reasons, a government statement published on Saturday stated.
The local politician was a consultant for the committee that approved the renovation project that Wang Fuk Court was undergoing when the deadly blaze broke out last November.
…During the inquiry hearings, residents testified that Wong, a member of the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), had amassed proxy votes from residents and interfered with meetings about renovation matters.
Last month, media reported that Wong’s team had collected proxy votes in the name of deceased residents.
…A veteran politician, Wong served on the Tai Po District Council from 2000 to 2019, when she lost her seat amid a pro-democracy landslide victory during the elections that year.
She was re-elected in 2023 during the first district council elections held after authorities overhauled the electoral system to ensure only those deemed “patriotic” could run for office.
What’s wrong with ‘to spend more time with her family’?
A total of 168 people died at Wang Fuk Court. An enquiry is underway, and has heard plentiful evidence that the firms awarded the renovation contract cut corners on safety to maximise profits, while officials failed to spot anything wrong or respond adequately to residents’ complaints. Peggy Wong, a patriot who lost in the previous open election, used her office to help the winning parties get the contract. Draw what conclusions you will.
Data spotted by Numberwang: barely half – 51.7% – of the inmates in Hong Kong detention facilities have been convicted. Another 3.6% are immigration cases. That leaves over 44.7% who are on remand and thus yet to be found guilty of anything.
In absolute terms, the number of people on remand in Hong Kong has risen from around 1,500 at end-2019 to just under 5,000 today. The number of convicted prisoners has remained pretty steady.
Looks like a serious backlog in the courts. It can’t all be because of arrested booksellers, folk suspected of seditious intent to be seditious and other NatSec cases denied bail. And there are no signs of a massive crimewave. So perhaps there’s a shortage of judges?
When taking a bus, I try to pick a seat that avoids the sun. On east-west trips, sit on the north side; on northbound routes, sit on the left in the morning and the right in the afternoon – and vice-versa for southbound. I barely think about it. But apparently some people need to be told, or want to be sure to take zig-zags in the route into account. A public-spirited geek called Jacob Shing has put an app together.
For someone who asked: if you want all your junk taken away, these people look good.
Just glancing at Numberwang’s chart re “People in Prison 2019-present”;
~7,000 in 2019 -> ~11,000 today is a huge increase!
Has Hong Kong seen a construction boom for detention facilities? Had Hong Kong been operating facilities far below capacity pre-protests? Or would it be reasonable to assume that inmates are housed in increasingly cramped and inhumane conditions?
Obviously in Hong Kong you can get a doctor’s note for a small fee. There was a Chinese Medicine practitioner in HK01 a couple of weeks ago, busted for selling untaxed mainland cigarettes, a reporter investigated and found he was also selling sick notes for $100. The state of the guy, sitting in a wifebeater, smoking in his scruffy crappy dirty shop and yet he is licensed medical professional allowed to write legally binding DX for sick notes! I am sure Smeggy Peggy knows more than a few of these people.
Hoping some of the English-language journalists surprise us all and do some investigative work into this.
Would it be an act of soft resistance to suggest The Patriot Peggy ‘a wrong un’ Wong faces investigation by the police for her part in the totally avoidable tragedy?
“A public-spirited geek called Jacob Shing has put an app together. ”
Props to his coding agent.
https://www.dimsumdaily.hk/dab-distances-itself-as-tai-po-councillor-peggy-wong-quits-over-wang-fuk-court-proxy%e2%80%91vote-row/
They are grooming her successor, handing out moon cakes on the PH estates.
Odds are however that there will be no by-election, as with the vacant Leggers seat.
So much for high tech surveillance, it was a farmer working his fields who called in the 3 suspicious vehicles heading for the UK air bade.
@Mary M,
It’s looking likely the act she reported was criminals stealing fuel and/or fertilizer to resell. Because some foreign forces started an aggressive, pointless war which has driven up prices making both attractive things to steal
@Young Charles,
There were as many as over 13,000 prisoners in 2003 (of which only about 1,400 were in remand). The reason? According to LegCo, there was “a sharp upsurge in female penal population since end-2000. The increase in female inmates [was] mainly due to the rapid increase in imprisonment rate for those females from the Mainland charged with “breach of condition of stay”.”
I probably don’t need to explain what they are breaching