Stating my case – reflections of 35 years of anti-graft service
By Ricky Chu Man-kin, then Director of Investigation (Private Sector)

Rookie days

As I ponder on my 35-year career at the ICAC, I would say it was full of challenges, lessons to learn and of course, satisfaction and achievements. Oh, even a few mistakes. Nevertheless they are all memories that I will always treasure.

When I was a student, I liked watching movies featuring heroic police officers and soldiers. When I returned home one day in the summer of 1971, my mother told me there was a registered mail for me from a university. When my mother went to a nearby post office to collect the letter, someone claiming to be from the post office asked her for $5 before handing her the letter. Looking back, that incident and all those good cop movies I watched planted the seed for my aspiration to become a graft fighter. With the establishment of the ICAC in 1974 and its first drama series soon running on television, I was on board the anti-corruption agency by July 1978 as an Investigator.

In late 1978, I was assigned to be the officer-in-charge of a corruption investigation for the very first time. We were to arrest a police constable in Yau Ma Tei Police Station for accepting the bail money of $2,000 from a drug dealer as a reward for not prosecuting him. The drug dealer was cheated by a drug trafficker in a heroin deal. Instead of heroin, the drug trafficker sold rice to him for $2,000. The drug dealer reported the matter to the ICAC.

The drug dealer was required to attend the police station to answer bail on a specific day. We were all ready. But when the drug dealer came out from the police station, he told me the police constable returned the bail money to him. The operation ended without any arrest.

Just as we were standing down, I saw from the mirror of our vehicle two men leaving the police station together. And, lo and behold, there they were - the police constable and the drug trafficker! I was struck by the blatant collusion. I was determined to continue with the investigation and secure evidence against them. With some hard investigative work, we eventually managed to bring the police constable to justice. He was found guilty of soliciting and accepting bribe money from the drug trafficker.

Since then, countless investigation files landed on my desk. There were the men on the street, law enforcement officers, high-ranking public officials, business tycoons... you name it. Some got convicted in court and paid the price for their greediness, others escaped the strong arm of the law under various circumstances. As the saying goes: “You can’t win them all. You win some, and you lose some.” But the most important thing was that I had done my part, without fear or favour, prejudice or ill will. And I never lost faith in our well-established legal system.