Everyone Pays For Tai Po Except Officials
The Bill Nobody Signs
Victor Dawes SC stood up at the inquiry this week and said the quiet part out loud. Contractors caused the Tai Po fire, he told the panel, through continuous fraud, bad materials, false certificates, and blatant lying. Not sloppy. Not an accident. A pattern, built over years.
Prestige Construction and Engineering ran the HK$336 million renovation at Wang Fuk Court and now carries most of the blame for a fire that killed 168 people. Fine. Somebody should.
Here is the part that should bother you more. The same inquiry said the government shares responsibility too, for letting contractors mark their own homework with nobody checking. That line got one headline and moved on.
Meanwhile 1,786 families, nearly every owner at Wang Fuk Court, have agreed to sell their flats back to the government. HK$6.8 billion is heading out the door for the burned blocks alone. They are the ones packing boxes this month. Nobody in government is packing anything.
Oversight For Everyone Else
Development secretary Bernadette Linn says the system 'has never been designed to allow the professionals to do whatever they like unchecked.' Tighter monitoring, harsher penalties, all promised. Good.
The real move though is quieter. The Urban Renewal Authority wants to step in at the building inspection stage, before any tender goes out, through a new platform called Smart Tender launching in the fourth quarter of this year. That is the URA admitting the old system, contractors grading their own work, is broken everywhere, not just at Wang Fuk Court.
Which means if you own a flat in an old private building doing maintenance work anytime soon, expect a new layer of government checking before contractors even bid. Slower. Pricier. Probably necessary.
What it does not touch is who signs off when the checking fails again. Chief Executive John Lee holds his first unscripted question session with lawmakers on July 28. That is the first room where someone could actually ask which official gets held to the same standard as the contractor. My guess: nobody asks it directly, and if they do, watch how fast 'communication' becomes the answer instead of a name.
So who actually pays when the government admits it looked away for years? No official has lost a job, a pension, or a licence over it. The contractor gets named in an inquiry report. The families get a buyback cheque and a moving date. Whether anyone in a government office loses anything more than a stern quote gets tested on July 28, when John Lee faces lawmakers and someone can ask Bernadette Linn who else is being investigated. Watch what she has time to answer.
Sources
- SCMP -- development secretary vows tighter contractor oversight (scmp.com)
- Hong Kong Free Press -- government lawyer says deliberate cheating caused the blaze (hongkongfp.com)
- SCMP -- 90 percent of Wang Fuk Court owners sign up for buyback (scmp.com)
- RTHK -- URA proposes early intervention on maintenance risk (news.rthk.hk)
- RTHK -- John Lee to hold first open dialogue with lawmakers July 28 (news.rthk.hk)