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Hong Kong authorities raid company connected to Convoy

Hong Kong’s anti-graft body and market regulator have joined forces to raid the office of Town Health International Medical Group, a company that has strong ties to the embattled financial advisory firm Convoy Global.

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According to a Hong Kong stock exchange filling by Town Health, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) and the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) executed the search warrant on 9 February.

The warrant was carried out in accordance with the “Prevention of Bribery Ordinance”, which prohibits the offering of a bribe to employees of the company, and the use of false documents by an agent to deceive his “principal”.

Town Health’s founder and executive deputy chairman is Cho Kwai-chee, who is also a former director of Convoy.

Convoy is current suing Cho, along with 27 other current and former directors and employees, for HK$4.043bn ($516m, €432m, £381m) of company assets stolen through a complex network of companies.

Town Health’s shares were suspended from trading in November last year after the regulator found misleading information in some of the company’s earnings reports. The following month, Convoy’s shares were also suspended from trading.

Investigation continues

The raid is the latest move by the two authorities in the ongoing investigation, which began in December last year, into corruption and wrongdoing by Convoy.

To date, four people have been arrested during the investigation, including Convoy’s former chairman Quincy Wong Lee-man and Mark Mak Kwong-yiu, former chairman of a related financial services firm called Lerado.

In January, the second largest Convoy shareholder lashed out at the company’s chairman, calling him “rude”, for taking away his voting rights in a meeting where he had attempted to remove several members of the management team.

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