Hong Kong | Six former employees of a Hong Kong newspaper pleaded guilty to conspiracy

Six a former employee of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring with foreign actors, the news agency Reuters reports.

According to the prosecutor, a media mogul was involved in the conspiracy Jimmy Lai, Cheung Kim-hungwho was CEO of the magazine’s former owner Next Digital, former assistant publisher of Apple Daily Chan Pui-manformer editor-in-chief Ryan Lawformer managing editor Lam Man-chungformer editor-in-chief of the magazine’s English edition Fung Wai-kong and former editor-in-chief Yeung Ching-kee.

The purpose of the conspiracy was to request a foreign state or foreign organization to “impose sanctions or embargoes or take other hostile actions” against the governments of Hong Kong and China between July 2020 and June 2021.

Prosecutor Anthony Chau said the paper was being used as a platform to advocate for sanctions.

“The content at issue included articles purporting to be current affairs reporting, commentary articles, and petitions or propaganda that directly and illegally advocated a political agenda,” Chau said.

Prosecutor also referred to content already published by Apple Daily in March 2019, which he said contained seditious statements and calls to participate in pro-democracy demonstrations that year.

The prosecutor is scheduled to issue his verdict later this year.

A year The 2019 protests were the largest since the former British colony returned to China in 1997.

Pro-democracy advocates said at the time that China had broken its promise to preserve Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms under the “one country, two systems” formula.

The Communist Party of Mainland China pushed the so-called National Security Law into Hong Kong in 2020.

Since the law came into effect, several activists, journalists and ordinary people have been arrested and accused of endangering national security. Several media have also come under the teeth of the authorities, and many of them have had to stop operating.