香港特別行政區 訴 鄭大松

On 16 September 2026, the Court of Appeal (Pang, Chan and Tam JJ) handed down judgment in HKSAR v Zheng Dasong, CACC 220/2023, refusing the applicant's application for leave to appeal against his conviction for conspiracy to deal with property known or believed to represent proceeds of an indictable offence. The Respondent (HKSAR) was represented by Mr Wong Hei-yu, instructed by the Department of Justice.

The applicant was convicted at the District Court before Temporary Magistrate Leung Ka-ki and sentenced to 5 years and 8 months' imprisonment; his fiancée, the second defendant, was acquitted. The charge concerned US$83.7 million (about HK$653 million) flowing through the applicant's Bank of China (Hong Kong) account between January and August 2018. The applicant maintained the funds were used for a virtual currency arbitrage scheme run with a mainland Chinese associate, Chen Tiancheng, exploiting the price differential of Tether (USDT) between Bitfinex and the mainland platform Huobi.

The applicant advanced four grounds of appeal, all challenging the trial judge's application of the objective test from HKSAR v Harjani Haresh Murlidhar (2019) 22 HKCFAR 446 and her credibility findings. He contended the judge wrongly concluded he had reasonable grounds to believe the funds were criminal property, ignored his complaint to police after his account was frozen, improperly relied on the dispersal of the other investors post-freeze, and erred in finding him dishonest.

The Court held that: (1) the trial judge correctly applied Harjani, balancing factors favouring the applicant (the existence of a genuine trading venture, his knowledge of Chen's circle) against those pointing the other way, namely no capital contributed, a "don't want to dig deeper" attitude, mirror-pattern flow of funds from unknown counterparties, and a HK$500m+ volume passing through an account operated by a man of modest means (§51-56); (2) the police complaints did not displace the objective assessment, particularly given the applicant's own cautioned admission that he never asked about the source of the funds (§62-63); (3) the dispersal of investors was properly treated as part of the cumulative picture rather than as a stand-alone basis for guilt (§65); and (4) the credibility findings rested on concrete inconsistencies, including the gap between his cautioned statement (the account was opened for friends, the source was not enquired into) and his later "investment cooperation" narrative (§66-71).

Why it matters

Leave to appeal was refused and the conviction stands. For practitioners, the practical takeaway is that in crypto-arbitrage cases where the defendant is a nominal account-holder with no capital of his own, courts will look past the trading label. The Harjani objective test rarely yields a reasonable doubt where the client declined to make basic inquiries about counterparties moving tens of millions through an account bearing his name.