Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai (黎智英) said that he personally had “nothing to do with” a report on Hunter Biden’s alleged Chinese business links, but admitted that funds from his private firm had been used to fund it.
Lai, a prominent democracy advocate in Hong Kong and a staunch critic of China, wrote on Twitter that he was “sorry” that his flagship newspaper, the Apple Daily, had been implicated in an article by US media outlet NBC.
In the article, NBC said that a 64-page document circulating on the Internet about the purported connections of Biden — the son of former US vice president Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate — to the Chinese Communist Party and his business dealings in China had “questionable authorship and anonymous sourcing.”
Photo: EPA-EFE
The article cited the coauthor of the “intelligence document,” Christopher Balding, as saying that the document had been “commissioned by Apple Daily,” which the paper said in a statement were “false allegations.”
Balding, an academic, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While Lai said that his newspapers had not commissioned the 64-page document, he admitted that his senior executive Mark Simon had “worked with the project.”
“Mark used my private company’s money to reimburse for the research he requested. It’s only US$10,000 so he didn’t have to have my approval,” Lai wrote on Twitter. “I know it is hard for anyone to believe that I didn’t know about it and my integrity is damaged.”
In a statement posted online, Simon said that he had resigned because of the incident, and apologized for having “allowed damage to Jimmy on a matter he was completely in the dark on.”
He gave no further details when contacted by reporters.
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