COURT: Chan Chun-chuen, you have been found guilty by a jury of the forgery of a will purporting to be the will of the late Mrs Nina Wang and of then using that forgery in an endeavour to persuade people that you were the true beneficiary of her estate.
The maximum sentence for each offence under the Crimes Ordinance is 14 years’ imprisonment which serves to show how, in some circumstances, forgery can be an extremely serious offence.
In listening to the evidence, it has been brought home to me just how serious your conduct was. Notwithstanding that, on the evidence, you received, during Mrs Wang’s lifetime, over HK$3 billion which enabled you to carry on a life of luxury few people in the world could ever imagine, you were not content with that and decided that you would have her business empire and estate as well.
Not only is yours a story of unbelievable greed, but you intended to take for yourself what should have passed to the Chinachem Charitable Foundation Limited under the terms of Mrs Wang’s last will dated 28 July 2002. The real victim of your crime, apart from the good name and reputation of Mrs Wang, was a charitable foundation which Mrs Wang hoped would provide charitable works “until eternity”, as she put it.
The Foundation was also to look after certain named individuals during their lives and, in particular, to provide care and assistance to the staff of the Chinachem group of companies and their children so that they would continue studying and enhancing their own value, in order to bring benefits to mankind”.
These may be lofty ideals but that was what she wanted her legacy to be. That was what she put in her 2002 will and that was what she told a number of people she intended to do while she was alive. It is also clear on the evidence that she was active during her lifetime in providing for charitable causes which were dear to her heart.
I have no doubt, and the jury’s verdict has now shown, that Mrs Wang had no wish to substitute you for the Chinachem Charitable Foundation as her sole heir and beneficiary. Instead, the Chinachem Foundation has been forced to spend, no doubt, many millions of dollars in litigation to challenge the claims which you made under that forgery. Yet never once, since that extremely ill-advised press conference at the Grand Hyatt Hotel on 20 April 2007, until today, six years later, has there been the slightest remorse in your conduct.
It is clear from the evidence I have heard, that you are nothing more than a clever and, no doubt, beguiling charlatan. From the moment you inveigled yourself into Mrs Wang’s presence in early 1992, claiming that the husband whom she loved so much was still alive somewhere on the eastern part of the Hong Kong seaboard, to the last days of her life when she lay in hospital on her deathbed, you were still boasting of your powers which would allow her to overcome her misfortunes.
Extraordinarily, notwithstanding that Mrs Wang must have been extremely sick and frail in her final days, you still managed to get out of her, two days before she died, no less than £30 million.
Mrs Wang has come out of these proceedings, in her final years, as a sad, lonely and somewhat tragic figure but you took full advantage of her sadness and loneliness and her tragic life, at first by claiming that you could find her kidnapped husband and then by claiming that you had the answer to her terminal illness. I have no doubt that she trusted you, or trusted in you, or she would not have enriched you to the tune of over $3 billion during her lifetime.
But your final act was the cruellest and most egregious of all, and that, not your earlier conduct, is the one for which I must sentence you. Cruel because, by this forgery, not only did you insult Nina Wang’s friendship by changing what was her treasured legacy, but egregious because, had you succeeded, you would have cheated a charitable foundation out of what they would have been entitled to distribute in accordance with Mrs Wang’s wishes to deserving causes under that legacy. The result would have been that, instead of benefiting mankind as Nina Wang wanted to be remembered for, the only one to benefit would have been you.
During this trial, I have been extremely impressed by the calm and measured evidence of Mrs Wang’s three siblings, Dr Kung, Dr Molly Gong, and Mrs Tong. None of them appeared to angle their evidence against you, nor did they display any bitterness or rancour. I confess I was not expecting them to be so openly frank, unassuming and, in a word, normal. I can well understand why Mrs Wang would have wanted to make sure, by appointing them directors of the Chinachem Charitable Foundation in the last days of her life, that they, and not you, would look after the legacy of her life’s work.
I appreciate and applaud that your life has taken a new direction since these events took place. But I am to sentence you for your conduct which precedes that change, conduct which can only be described as both shameless and wicked, as well as borne of unparalleled greed.
I have canvassed with your counsel, such is the exceptional nature of this case and the sheer magnitude of the estate from which you stood to benefit under the forged will, whether the appropriate starting point should be the maximum sentence available to me under the law. Sentencing judges should not use their imaginations to conjure up unlikely worst possible kinds of cases. What they should consider is the worst type of offence which comes before the court and ask themselves whether the particular case they are dealing with comes within the broad band of that type.
In my judgment, this is one such case. But even if I were to try and conjure up in my imagination a worse possible case than this, I would have extreme difficulty in thinking of one. The reason is not just the vast fortune you would have obtained had your crime been successful, but the shameless dishonouring of a woman who must have placed great faith, personal trust and friendship in you during her life and the wicked way in which the true beneficiaries, a charitable organisation, would have been cheated and deprived of the means of carrying out Mrs Wang’s obvious and much vaunted charitable aims.
I am also conscious that this is not an amateurish or clumsy forgery but an extremely well-executed and planned forgery which has resulted in millions of dollars now being spent by Mrs Wang’s real intended beneficiaries in civil proceedings, not to mention this criminal prosecution, in order to show what has now, today, been conclusively proved. And this particular forgery involves a will which is, by its nature, a particularly nasty and insidious type of forgery because the person who ostensibly made the will can no longer speak in defence of his or her true intentions.
The point has been made that had Mr Winfield Wong, to his great credit as a careful solicitor, not asked to read the document he was being asked to witness on 16 October 2006, you might even have succeeded in this fraud. At least it would have made this prosecution much more difficult.
I am driven to the conclusion that if ever there is a case for the application of the maximum sentence for forgery as a starting point, this is the case. Accordingly, the starting point that I do take in this case is 14 years’ imprisonment.
The next question is what, if any, discount from that figure I should give, bearing in mind that you have not pleaded guilty, you have shown no remorse, and nor are you a person of unblemished character as the details of your criminal record have now made clear. There is, to my mind, no significant mitigation save for one matter in your favour which is deserving of credit and another of rather less significance.
As anyone looking at the court list will see, this case was originally fixed for 60 working days. It has taken exactly half of that time and the reason it has only taken 30 days, or 31 days, is because of the way your legal team, in particular Mr Kan, have conducted your defence. It has been done sensibly and sensitively, concentrating on the essentials needed to put forward your case.
Furthermore, almost every witness, during the course of his or her examination-in-chief, was able to be referred by Mr Perry to a statement of Admitted Facts which ran to 23 pages and incorporated 120 paragraphs. The extent to which the case has been agreed or admitted has allowed all parties to concentrate on the essential areas which were not agreed without requiring the prosecution to call evidence or prosecution witnesses to give evidence as to the surrounding facts and circumstances which were not in dispute. And those admissions concern not purely formal issues; they deal with important areas of evidence which it would otherwise have been necessary to prove and would have taken weeks to do so.
Defendants should be encouraged to streamline complex cases in this way and you must take credit for having instructed or permitted your counsel to conduct the case in the way that they have. The case which you have put forward has not been so much a positive case as an attack on the validity and cogency of the prosecution evidence, which was an entirely proper and, one might argue, more sensible course for you to take. To your credit, and no doubt because of the recent changes in your life, you felt unable to go into the witness-box and give evidence which you knew would be untrue.
I have also considered the element of delay in this matter coming to trial. I wish to make clear that there has been no fault whatsoever on the part of the prosecution in prosecuting this case since they could not realistically arrest and charge you until the probate proceedings had run their course. Nor has there been any fault on the part of the prosecution in prosecuting this case since your arrest.
It is clear that the case became unnecessarily stalled in the Magistrates Court in 2011 and 2012, after you had received advice from a succession of solicitors and senior counsel for the purposes of a wholly unmeritorious preliminary inquiry which, having read the entire transcript of those proceedings, did not begin to fulfil the purpose for which preliminary inquiries are properly required.
Nor could it ever begin to achieve, nor did it achieve, the purpose for which it was said to be required. It was a wholly misconceived exercise which should never have been advised or undertaken. In saying that, I wish to make clear that no blame can attach to your current team of counsel or solicitors for that decision.
So let me make clear, there is no delay that can be attributable to the prosecution whatsoever. Any delay since your arrest on 3 February 2010, has been entirely of your own making. I do not see why the public should have to pay more than $2 million for a hearing first said by your then lawyers to be 15 days, involving seven witnesses; then 30 days, involving 26 witnesses, but which, in the end, ultimately took 9 days and involved two witnesses; and which was wholly misconceived from beginning to end.
Nevertheless, the fact remains, as a matter of history, that you were not arrested, or could not be arrested, until February 2010, nearly three years after the forged will first came to public attention. To that extent, this factor is an element - albeit not as strong as it might have been had there been any fault on the part of the prosecution - which I will throw into the equation when assessing your mitigation.
For the reasons I have discussed, I am going to discount the starting point by 2 years. That may seem a generous discount for these factors but I have adopted a high starting point. I intend to make the sentences on both counts wholly concurrent. Although one could argue that the offences are different, nevertheless, they both derive from the same conduct and intent.
The overall sentence I intend to pass upon you is one of 12 years’ imprisonment and the most expedient way of achieving that is by passing a sentence of 12 years’ imprisonment on Count 1 and 12 years’ imprisonment on Count 2, both sentences being ordered to run concurrently with each other.
You will also be ordered to pay the costs of the prosecution in respect of the hearing in the Magistrates Court from 14 May until the conclusion of the preliminary inquiry on 1 June 2012. Those costs will be taxed if not agreed. I make no order as to costs in relation to the Cellmark evidence.
That is the sentence of the court.