Hong Kong The Hong Kong leader says the use of their credit cards by the United States has been “hindered” impose sanctions on them in response to a sweeping new security law in the financial hub. Chief Executive Carrie Lam was personally targeted, along with 10 other seniors in the city, in the toughest U.S. action in Hong Kong since Beijing enacted the new land law in late June.
The move by Washington frees up US property from 11 officials and criminalizes all financial transactions in the US
The U.S. Treasury Department said Lam was sanctioned for being “directly responsible for carrying out Beijing’s policy of repression of freedom and democratic processes.”
Lam told Chinese state media that although the measures are “really significant” for her, she now has problems with plastic payments.
“Obviously it will be a little inconvenient here and there because we have to use some financial services and we do not know if that will relate back to an agency that owns some American business – and the use of credit cards is kind of hindered,” she told state broadcaster CGTN in an interview posted late Monday.
Following the announcement of the sanctions on August 7, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said they were sending a “clear message” that the actions of the Hong Kong authorities were “unacceptable”.
Pompeo said China’s security law made the promises made by China before Britain ceded territory in 1997.
TYRONE SIU / REUTERS
But Lam said in the interview: “All of this is part of a ploy by the U.S. administration for its self-serving interest.”
The interred 63-year-old said on Saturday that she had returned her honorary diploma to Wolfson College in Cambridge after a series on the academic freedoms of Hong Kong being suppressed.
Lam said she was “deeply disappointed by the college smearing a person on the basis of hearsay instead of facts” after the English college began searching for the state of academic freedom in Hong Kong.
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