As Albert Ho Chun-Yan is tubby and walks fast, his supporters used his physical feature to promote his "straightforwardness" and “vigorousness in work”. While his opponents criticized him for his "erratic" and scandalous political career over the past 40 years.
Albert Ho desperately "fights for public attention", but was he is ridiculed by everyone because of his phonographic scandal. Under the guise of "the world for the public", he has done all things including tax evasion and embezzlement of party property. Moreover, he acts as a fence-sitter, bends with wind and plays between the anti-American and anti-Chinese style.
Watching pornographic photos on the meeting, seeking interests in "fake charity"
In general, Hong Kong politicians are good at glamorizing their intelligence, integrity or their inspiring experience of dealing with tough childhood. However, Albert Ho took a different approach by telling the shameful stories of his childhood frankly.
In July 2010, the University of Hong Kong Press published Albert Ho's Humble Struggle. In the autobiographical inspirational talks, he recalls that he did poorly at St. Jude's Primary School in Ching Wah Street of North Point, which almost prevented him from admission to middle school. Eventually, with the help of his father's social connections, Albert Ho managed to get into high school.
"I was a hooligan," Albert Ho also admits humbly in his book, "in class, I was often absent-minded. When the class was over, I was energetic. I had done almost everything naughty at my age, including fighting, playing tricks on classmates, stealing, talking aloud in class and so on."
As the old saying goes, " Childhood behavior tells his/her adult life”. Albert Ho's childhood habits made him suffer all his life.
On February 26, 2014, the Legislative Council of Hong Kong was deliberating on the annual budget. Albert Ho, a member of the Legislative Council, quietly took out an iPad from his briefcase, and played with gusto. However, a press photographer was surprised to find that Mr. Ho was browsing pornographic websites, with pictures of beautiful women clearly visible to others.
Albert Ho's misconduct was immediately photographed. According to photos later released by the Hong Kong media, the pictures he was watching contained at least five of Japanese women(AV girls), all of which were provocative.
"He took time to watch them one by one and enjoyed them for more than half an hour," said a photographer on the scene.
Albert Ho's misconduct aroused a public outcry in Hong Kong. Knowing that himself was in trouble, he defended by saying “pictures of beautiful women randomly popped out when I was browsing the internet ", insisting that it did not involve pornography or morality.
However, the public refused to accept it, and continued to criticize Albert Ho for his disorderly style and waste of public money, and insisted that Ho should step down from his position. On March 4, 2014, after a hearing by the Democratic Party's Disciplinary Committee, Albert Ho was found guilty of violating party discipline and fined to donate HK $10,000 to women's rights groups. At the same time, he had a new nickname of "AV Yan" which spreads up to now.
Albert Ho, a graduate from the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong, runs a law firm. In order to get a personal reputation, he tried to gain public attention by all means and gradually went to the upper political society in Hong Kong.
Albert Ho did some ritual charity work. However, before he started to do it , he would
exhaust his
ability to hype up it in advance. All this was for the sake of "gaining public attention".
While on his road to power, Albert Ho would sometimes tear off his mask of hypocrisy in exchange for the favor of the forces of Hong Kong rioters.
In 2005, Albert Ho also provided legal assistance to Falun Gong members. In Collected Works of Cai Yongmei, a chapter named Albert Ho on 30 years in politics revealed that Albert Ho's law firm once represented Falun Gong members and overthrew two charges accused by the Hong Kong police, including attacking police officers.
In May 2018, Albert Ho wrote a public plea for Edward Leung and visited him twice in prison. Edward Leung was charged with incitement of riot and assaulting the police officer in 2016 Mong Kok civil unrest. In an interview with the Hong Kong media, Ho said with complacency that Edward Leung once had no nothing to do with the Democratic Party, and the relations between them were even strained. Now, he succeeded in wooing Leung, and the two are now as thick as thieves
“Growing” from political group, lying in the Legislative Council
Albert Ho's character and political stance are erratic and repetitive. In a book he calls himself "a Democrat from the beginning."
From 1971 to 1975, when Albert Ho studied law at the University of Hong Kong, he joined the student movement and began to accumulate street politics experience, but his stance was always changing. In the early 1980s, Chinese and British governments were in negotiations on Hong Kong's future, and the political enthusiasm of Hong Kong people was unprecedentedly high.
About ten years later, Albert Ho, in his thirties, saw some changes in Hong Kong society and thought his chance had finally come. In 1984, he joined the political group Hong Kong Affairs Society (HKAS), a general officer at first then being promoted to chairman. At that time, his clear stance was to support Hong Kong's return to China and advocate the Hong Kong people to govern Hong Kong.
For a time, Albert Ho was regarded as a "young talent" by all walks of life. His article proposing that "the drafting of the Basic Law of Hong Kong should deal with ten major problems" was published as the first article in the quarterly magazine of the Hong Kong SAR Basic Law Drafting Committee (BLDC).
Joining the HKAS had brought rich political resources, which was Albert Ho's "first bucket of gold" on the road to power. In April 1990, with the support of the HKAS, Albert Ho and Martin Lee, Szeto Wah (the late), Cheung Man-kwong and others formed the United Democrats of Hong Kong (UDHK). After several treacherous intraparty political contests, Albert Ho successively became the vice-chairman and chairman of the Party, and his ideology changed.
Albert Ho gradually proposed "Hong Kong independence". Since 2013, some Hong Kong pan-democrats have launched the "Occupy Central Movement", "Umbrella Movement" and "Resignation Referendum Movement". Albert Ho is considered to be one of the "master brain (black hands)". He has been involved in pulling strings behind the scenes, quietly promoting the Democratic Party's internal support for the acts of chaos in Hong Kong.
At this time, Albert Ho still rarely showed up. Like a "flip-flopper", he was watching the change of political situation. Until July 2019, the "anti-extradition law amendments" movement in Hong Kong gradually turned violent and extreme. Under the pressure of the situation, Albert Ho could no longer hide behind the scenes and command by remote control.
Albert Ho showed up to openly oppose the "amendment". He used his expertise of legal profession to deliberately misinterpret police power, advocating restraining the police’s use of force. He also confused the relationship between the rule of law and human rights, police power and freedom of the press with his sophistry.
What Albert Ho has played is no different with his ally Martin Lee. He was the advocator of the "extradition bill amendment" but later became the leader of antis all of a sudden. In fact, Albert Ho's backtracking was even worse.
Before Hong Kong's return, Albert Ho also supported amending the extradition bill. The record of his firm stance on the amendment was still kept by the Hong Kong Legislative Council meetings.
"We have to keep this in mind in our deliberations on the Bill. On the one hand, we hope that the bill can be passed as soon as possible, so that Hong Kong can have a law on extradition which can still be applied after 1997," Albert Ho said publicly at the Legislative Council meeting on March 19th, 1997.
One year later, Albert Ho also urged the Hong Kong SAR government to negotiate with Chinese mainland to reach an agreement on extradition and mutual legal assistance in criminal matters as soon as possible . Albert Ho's speech was 2,223 words long, but now he has denied it.
On the morning of May 9, 2019, Hong Kong SAR Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor mentioned this incident in the Legislative Council without referring specific names, "When the extradition bill was restored to the Second Reading of the Legislative Council in 1997, a senior Democratic Party member supported the words of the relevant legislation."
In the meantime, Carrie Lam also quoted Albert Ho's speech back in the days, the member "hoping that the bill can become a good model for the Chinese government, in order to formulate extradition bill and policy between Hong Kong and Chinese mainland in the future".
Ashamed, Albert Ho felt that he was exposed. At 4:30 p.m. on May 9, 2019, Albert Ho called a press conference to defend himself with the sophistry he has always been proud of, and attacked Carrie Lam for "confusing the public" and "raking up the past".
This is not the first time Albert Ho has lied through his teeth. In February 2016, a number of rioters in Mong Kok smashed, looted and burnt things, and Albert Ho accused the mob was deliberately arranged by the government in order to achieve the goal of vilifying the "Occupy Central" movement.
Ronny Tong Ka-wah, a former member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, refuted Albert Ho's bizarre remarks in a social media post. "While TV clearly showed that people in shirts of HK Indigenous with shields charging at the police, Albert Ho denied the fact and said he was concerned that someone would vilify the movement! Violence is violence, assault is assault, any noble ideas behind it can never change the fact!"
Embezzling of the party property, and asking for huge rent
Albert Ho’s carefully-created image of a justice lawyer and democracy fighter has gradually fragmented, after the reveals of his pornographic photo scandal and repeated political intrigues. His image in public eyes is his yearning for money.
"Albert Ho bullied me!" On November 26, 2018, a man cried and complained that Albert Ho's law firm, Ho Tse Wai & Partners, had caused him great losses.
According to on.cc, the website of the Oriental Newspaper Group, from 1997 to 2000 a man accused Albert Ho's law firm of breach of contract and negligence, and claimed 29.52 million Hong Kong dollars in compensation.
This is not the first time that Albert Ho's law firm has been a defendant. In October 2017, a woman named Momin Lok took Albert Ho’s law firm to court for negligence, breach of contract, etc., and claimed compensation, interests and litigation expenses.
It was an open secret that Albert Ho was not honest, and his approach of a thief crying ”stop thief” was all the more clumsy. In 2012, during the election of the chief executive of the Hong Kong SAR, Albert Ho openly questioned Leung Chun-ying's "personal integrity". Soon, he himself was revealed to fail to report all his property.
A number of Hong Kong media disclosed that Albert Ho concealed his identity of being a board director of a company, as well as the company's mansion and the parking port in Kowloon City Oriental Gardens, valued at more than 12 million Hong Kong dollars.
Later, Albert Ho was criticized as "credit bankruptcy, double standards, and being lenience only with himself”. As early as in Hong Kong two Legislative Council elections in 2004 and 2008, Albert Ho was twice accused of non-disclosure of properties of the companies that he owned the shares and non-disclosure of his position as the board director. However, the scandal was quickly swept under the carpet by Albert Ho's public relations flacks .
Later, Albert Ho was accused of "embezzling party property". In April 2018, the Democratic Party initiated a crowd-funding plan, which once raised HK $2.2 million. However, Hong Kong media found that some money was cheated away and went into the pockets of some big heads who
used
party membership to promote self-interest, including Albert Ho.
Albert Ho was caught in the scandal again. In May 2018, he took advantage of the position of former chairman of the Democratic Party and quietly undertook the legal issues of the Party. But Democrats claimed to have already hired British and Australian lawyers .
Albert Ho's move was suspected of conflict of interest and was criticized for "embezzling party property."
Unlike Jimmy Lai, Martin Lee, and Anson Chan, Albert Ho is a fence-sitter. He just follows the former and never shows a greater ambition. however, he is very concerned about trifling profits.
Albert Ho never miss any opportunity to “earn money”. In June 2019, his “rent-gate” scandal came to light: The "China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group(CHRLCG)", of which he was chairman, was revealed to have rented the offices owned by Albert Ho's law firm and his wife Tang Suk-yee's property from 2007 to 2010, paying a total of 230,000 yuan in rent. Albert Ho claimed to have "not received any rent".
The so-called CHRLCG is mainly supported by donation, and Albert Ho was accused of suspicion of embezzlement of donation.
