HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL.
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I pass now to a subject which has been commented on not a little in the last few weeks, and which, but for the fact that the present unfortunate hostilities between Japan and China are overshadowing everything else, would most certainly have gained more public attention and criticism. At the September Criminal Sessions of the Supreme Court two cases were tried in which the Revenue Department appeared in none too happy a light. In one, two Chinese Revenue Officers were indicted for armed robbery while purporting to be searching a junk for contraband cargo. They were found guilty. In the other, a European Revenue Officer was charged with having received a bribe in connection with his duties, and the trial revealed the following astounding state of affairs: Witnesses for the Crown included a number of Chinese Revenue Officers who confessed to having received bribes of varying sums in the same transaction. Some of them even deposed to the receipt of similar bribes by other Chinese Revenue Officers who were not called, making a total of twelve officers in all guilty of this offence. One would have thought that this was a sufficiently serious matter to warrant at least the suspension of these officers pending investigation, instead of which the fact was that they one and all continued on duty and, at least nine weeks after the discovery of the offence, were still entrusted with the collection of the Colony's revenue. In the absence of any reasonable explanation— and for the life of me I cannot see how one can be forthcoming-the position is nothing short of scandalous. I am well aware of the necessity for making use of accomplices in order to secure evidence against one of their number. Never, however, in my experience or within my knowledge has so responsible a body as a government stooped to the point of retaining these accomplices in its service in order to achieve this end. The proper and only course would have been to dismiss these persons, at the same time not charging them, or, alternatively, offering no evidence against them, and if this did not prove sufficient inducement to give evidence, the matter should have ended there. Looking through Hansard for 1934 some days ago I chanced upon some remarks under the heading of Bribes in the Budget Speech of the then Senior Unofficial Member, Sir William Shenton (Hansard 1934 pp. 138-139), suggesting that Government investigate carefully into the possibility of corrupt practices in the Revenue Department on the ground of a single entry in a trader's book and certain rumours. If cause for careful investigation then existed on such comparatively meagre evidence, I venture to suggest that these two cases, one of armed robbery and another of barefaced, "mass" receipt of bribes by a dozen officers, calls for one of those rigid inquiries which Americans so vividly describe as a "probe". In future, too, the Superintendent of Imports and Exports might well take a leaf out of the Hon. I.G.P.'s book, and deal in his annual report with the conduct of the officers in his Department.
I cannot conclude without some reference to Heads 18 and 19 in the Memorandum on the Estimates of Expenditure for 1938- Magistracy, Hong Kong and Kowloon. Provision is here made for coping with "the progressively increasing number of cases" on both
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