Club Lunch: The Big Bribe? Patrick Ho’s Corruption Trial and Its Consequences

Former Hong Kong Home Secretary Patrick Ho Chi-ping sits in a Manhattan jail awaiting trial on charges that he made millions of dollars in bribes to African officials to obtain lucrative oil rights for a Chinese conglomerate. If convicted he faces many years in prison. Veteran New York criminal defense lawyer Robert Precht will shed light on the U.S. government’s strategy in bringing Ho to trial. The case is likely to produce incriminating evidence about companies with close ties to the Chinese government and could ultimately lead to reforms in business practices in China.

Robert Precht is President of Justice Labs, a legal think tank based in New York. His previous long career as a public defender includes his work as a defense attorney in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial in New York, about which he wrote the critically-acclaimed book Defending Mohammad (Cornell University Press, 2003). Following the trial he spent a decade as Assistant Dean of Public Service at the University of Michigan Law School. In 2008 Precht opened the Beijing office of a legal education NGO and later co-founded with barrister Azan Marwah the Hong Kong Public Interest Law Group.