Former Hong Kong prosecutor Grenville Cross not retiring quietly
Feisty former DPP is a professor at more than one university and is also not afraid to speak up, as present DPP Kevin Zervos discovered
Four years after bowing out of the directorship of public prosecutions, arguably the second most influential post in the Department of Justice, Grenville Cross is no less busy.
Just last week, the spirited 62-year-old took aim at his latest target: Kevin Zervos, the incumbent DPP who will be leaving the job on Sunday.
Zervos was blamed for failing to push the graft-buster to speed up checks into former chief executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen's alleged acceptance of advantageous treatment from tycoons while in office.
It sparked a war of words rarely seen between legal eagles who hailed from the same government department - not to mention Tsang's was a case replete with sensitivities including criminal justice and the rule of law.
By next week, Zervos will almost certainly have left behind a pile of files marked "pending" - files with names that could have come from a Who's Who: Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, former Independent Commission Against Corruption chief Timothy Tong Hin-ming, and Secretary for Development Paul Chan Mo-po, to name a few.
That made it all the more important Zervos should not dump the long-running hot potatoes into his successor's lap, Cross argued, especially since the DPP was an expert on corruption cases. "This is not fair to Tsang, this is not fair to [successor] Keith Yeung [Kar-hung], and this is not fair to Hong Kong, to its criminal justice system," Cross said in an interview with the .
