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HONG KONG (REUTERS) – Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai said he personally “had nothing to do” with a report on alleged trade ties to China by the son of US presidential candidate Joe Biden, but admitted that funds from his private company had been used. to finance it.
Mr. Lai, a leading Hong Kong defender of democracy and a staunch critic of China, said on Twitter that he “regretted” that his flagship newspaper, Apple Daily, was implicated in an article by US media outlet NBC.
In the article, NBC alleged that a 64-page document circulating on the Internet about Hunter Biden’s alleged connections to the Chinese Communist Party and its business in China had “questionable authorship and anonymous sourcing.”
The article quoted the co-author of the “intelligence document”, Christopher Balding, as saying that the document had been “commissioned by Apple Daily”, which the newspaper said in a statement were “false accusations.”
Balding, an academic, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
While Mr. Lai said his newspapers had not personally commissioned the 64-page document, he admitted that his senior executive, Mr. Mark Simon, had “worked with the project.
“Mark used the money from my private company to reimburse the research he requested. It only costs US $ 10,000 (S $ 13,700), so he did not need my approval,” added Mr. Lai on Twitter.
“I know it is difficult for anyone to believe that I did not know and that my integrity is damaged.”
In a statement posted online, Simon said he had resigned due to the incident and apologized for having “allowed Jimmy to harm on a matter about which he was completely in the dark.
He did not elaborate when contacted by Reuters.
The Apple Daily recently published two articles about Hunter Biden and his ties to a Taiwanese businessman who, according to the newspaper, was an alleged broker “who enabled the Hunter Biden deals in mainland China for a decade.”
But the newspaper said in a statement that these stories had been made by its own journalists in Taiwan with independent verification of their own findings and were separate from the 64-page document.
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