The Yuen Chau Kok short piling scam mainly involved three people who quickly became known as the “Hui Hon Trio”- two ex-directors of Hui Hon together with the site agent who was responsible for overseeing the Yuen Chau Kok foundation works on behalf of Hui Hon.
During interrogation, the site agent put forward the defence that he was only acting upon his bosses’ instructions; his bosses had insisted on a particular method to construct the piles and he had simply asked the workers to carry out their orders.
The two Hui Hon ex-directors denied that they knew about or had taken part in the scam. One of them claimed he was mainly responsible for marketing and seldom carried out site inspections. He did admit that he had purchased and used Super Mud to deal with soil collapses in the piling shafts, but said that he believed his subordinate, the site agent, must first have obtained HD’s approval. He said that no site staff had ever reported to him that some of the temporary casings had not reached the founding level. The other ex-director claimed that his job was mainly to collect payments and pitch for new business; he seldom visited construction sites.
They both denied having instructed site staff to drill boreholes without installing the temporary casings. ICAC’s Mr Leung recollects, “Up to this point in the investigation, there was still no evidence to prove that these two ex-directors of Hui Hon and the site agent had entered into a definite or verbal agreement to build short piles in the project.”
In their report to the ICAC, HD said that they suspected that corruption among the Yuen Chau Kok site staff might lie behind the non-compliance. Zen Pacific in their turn stated that acceptance of advantages might be affecting HD’s monitoring of the site, because Hui Hon’s site staff had close relationships with HD’s site staff.
With respect to this contention, the site agent agreed that they had indeed lunched with the site staff of HD but that all the lunch bills had been properly recorded. For convenience’ sake, these bills would first be settled by Hui Hon and the HD site staff would later pay $30 for each meal on a monthly basis.
HD’s site staff also admitted to having played mahjong once with the Hui Hon site staff. They had also twice visited karaoke bars together, sharing the costs among them.
The site agent strongly denied having offered any advantages to HD site staff. Even if the Hui Hon side had sometimes subsidized lunches, he said, this had nothing to do with any short piling.
There was insufficient evidence to support the alleged corruption. The ICAC investigation could still move forward, however, because, pursuant to Section 10(5) of the ICAC Ordinance, if an investigation into corruption leads to a suspicion that other offences (such as conspiracy to defraud) may have been committed, the ICAC has the legal power to continue pursuing such a lead.
It soon came to light that some of the site staff were aware of construction irregularities during the seven months when Hui Hon was in charge of the work. The site foreman employed by Hui Hon from mid March to July 1998 told an ICAC investigator that, because the project was progressing so slowly, he had been instructed to drive the temporary casings to a depth of only 20 m to 30 m below ground, rather than to founding level. He also said that he knew that two ex-directors of Hui Hon had ordered the workers to use Super Mud to stabilize the walls of excavated shafts without installing temporary casings for support.
The site foreman also pointed out that in May 1998, a few months after construction started, two to three lorry loads of concrete were left over after workers had cast the concrete into two pile shafts. This was unusual because the volume of concrete ordered ought to have matched the amount required to create piles of the prescribed depth. A small amount of concrete might well be left over after casting was complete, but such a large excess could mean only one thing: the pile shafts were shorter than prescribed, and so could not hold the correctly ordered amount of concrete.
The site foreman went on to say that he was aware of the various construction problems at Yuen Chau Kok. In an on-site inspection meeting with the directors of Hui Hon, he had raised both the operating problems being encountered with the Bauer BG 40 rig and the excess concrete issue. The directors took no action. He stated that the foreman, the site agent and the assistant engineer all shared his concerns, but that the management still insisted on their own preferred way of doing the piling work.
He carried on voicing his concerns until early July 1998, when he raised a final alarm with the site agent. This was once again ignored by the management, so he immediately resigned and left.