Chinese Billionaire Asks to Delay Prison Sentence Yet Again
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/15/nyregion/chinese-billionaire-ng-lap-seng-prison.html Version 0 of 1. When Ng Lap Seng, a Chinese billionaire, was sentenced to four years in prison in May in a wide-ranging bribery case, the judge gave him two months — until July 10 — to begin serving his time. But as that date approached, Mr. Ng’s lawyers asked the judge for two additional months, to give Mr. Ng “sufficient time to get his complex business affairs in order.” The government objected, arguing that Mr. Ng, 70, was trying “to put off prison as long as possible on the ground that he is a successful businessman.” “That request is unwarranted, inequitable and should be denied,” a prosecutor wrote. The judge, Vernon S. Broderick of Federal District Court in Manhattan, denied Mr. Ng’s request for a two-month delay, but a new dispute has arisen, over whether Mr. Ng may postpone his surrender for medical reasons. Mr. Ng’s wealth — he is said to be worth $1.8 billion — has been an issue since his arrest in September 2015. When he was taken into custody, he was wearing a gold watch, encrusted in diamonds and worth about $200,000, prosecutors said then. His lawyers sought to have him released into a kind of self-financed home detention — a gilded cage, some have called it — a form of bail only a few federal judges in Manhattan have agreed to in recent years. Nearly a decade ago, Judge Jed S. Rakoff granted the prominent lawyer Marc S. Dreier a $10 million bond pending trial and allowed him to remain in his East Side apartment, secured by electronic monitoring and armed security guards, paid for by his family. He later pleaded guilty to leading a scheme that defrauded investors of $700 million. “Many kinds of bail conditions favor the rich,” Judge Rakoff wrote, adding that conversely, many defendants were too poor to afford “even the most modest of bail bonds or financial conditions of release.” “This is a serious flaw in our system,” the judge said. “But it is not a reason to deny a constitutional right to someone who, for whatever reason, can provide reasonable assurances against flight.” In 2016, Judge Richard M. Berman denied a similar request from Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian gold trader charged with conspiring to violate Iranian sanctions. Ruling that Mr. Zarrab posed a risk of flight and that no conditions, including privately funded armed guards, would assure his appearance at trial, Judge Berman also found such a request “unreasonable because it helps to foster inequity and unequal treatment in favor of a very small cohort of criminal defendants who are extremely wealthy, such as Mr. Zarrab.” The government objected to Mr. Ng’s release under similar conditions. A prosecutor, Daniel C. Richenthal, argued that Mr. Ng had access to private airplanes, foreign passports and was a risk to flee. “Fifty-million-dollar bond is meaningless to him; $20 million is meaningless to him,” Mr. Richenthal said. Judge Broderick, concluding there were conditions that could assure Mr. Ng’s appearance in court, granted Mr. Ng a $50 million bond, secured by $20 million in cash, and ordered “home detention” in an apartment at 240 East 47th Street, subject to GPS monitoring and an armed security team, at his own expense. Among other strict conditions, the judge also said Mr. Ng’s guards could use “legal force as they deem appropriate” to prevent him from fleeing. Mr. Ng was convicted in July 2017 of bribery, money laundering and other counts, for which he received the four-year sentence and was told to surrender on July 10. But last month, his lawyers asked for the delay until Sept. 10. They said Mr. Ng “helms a vast network of real estate businesses in China with many employees and a diverse portfolio of holdings worth billions of dollars.” He had been “working diligently to arrange for the management of his business while he is incarcerated,” one lawyer, George N. Bauer, wrote. In particular, he said, Mr. Ng was in the final stages of lengthy negotiations concerning a $10 billion real estate project that was expected to create 10,000 jobs and had made “significant progress,” but was “entering the most complex and precarious stage of the negotiations.” Objecting to the delay, Mr. Richenthal, the prosecutor, wrote that Mr. Ng’s “vast network of real estate businesses” did not entitle him to “special treatment with respect to surrender.” Mr. Bauer responded that Mr. Ng was not seeking “special treatment.” The judge denied the request on June 25, the same day Mr. Ng’s lawyers reported that Mr. Ng had been taken the evening before to the emergency room, suffering from severe back pain. Recently, Mr. Ng’s lawyers asked that he be allowed to seek treatment for a range of afflictions, including “recent recurrent and unpredictable headaches” and pain in other parts of his body. He had stents implanted in two coronary arteries and, his lawyers said, he had suffered a small stroke. Prosecutors, in a letter to the judge, questioned the “timing and sincerity” of Mr. Ng’s claims of headaches and pain, and suggested that he was “using his wealth and connections” to gain further delays. They submitted a letter from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which said it could provide Mr. Ng with “the necessary and appropriate care.” Judge Broderick, who granted several short extensions of Mr. Ng’s surrender date on medical grounds cited by his lawyers, has ordered a hearing for Monday at which he will consider Mr. Ng’s latest request that his surrender be delayed until July 23. |