The "Hui Hon Trio"

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."





 
up
 
down

[ Text version ]