James Ting, the former head of Akai Holdings, has escaped a retrial on charges of false accounting after the Court of Final Appeal ruled it would not be in the interest of justice to pursue him further.
The court, comprising non-permanent judge Lord Woolf, Chief Justice Andrew Li Kwok-nang, and permanent judges Kemal Bokhary, Patrick Chan Siu-oi and Roberto Ribeiro, found that although there was quite likely to be a degree of public outrage at Mr Ting walking free, that in itself was not enough reason to push ahead with a new trial.
'The disadvantages of a further trial outweigh the advantages,' wrote Lord Woolf.
In September last year, the Court of Appeal ruled that the jury in Mr Ting's case had been misdirected by trial judge Clare-Marie Beeson. The court ordered a retrial and released him on HK$10 million bail.
Mr Ting was convicted on June 29, 2005, of two counts of false accounting related to an allegedly fictitious purchase of a 50 per cent stake in MicroMain Systems for HK$300 million. He was sentenced to six years' jail and banned from being a company director for 12 years.
It was the harshest penalty handed down for a white-collar crime in almost a decade.
