https://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/137308/1/content.pdf?accept=1

p. 214 of The Lifting of Corporate Veil Doctrine in Hong Kong: An Empirical, Comparative and Development Perspective
Thomas K. Cheng

(1) Criminal cases

It is worth pondering the variations in success rate among different case types. As far as criminal cases are concerned, the greater judicial willingness to lift the veil could be attributed to the fact that the courts do not want to allow defendants to escape criminal sanctions through the use of the corporate form. HKSAR v Leung Yat Ming aptly illustrates this. 28 In that case, the defendants attempted to circumvent university regulations on the use of housing allowance by incorporating a company. Those regulations prohibited university employees from using their housing allowance to purchase property. It could only be used for rental payment. The defendants attempted to bypass
this prohibition by incorporating a company to purchase the property, which was subsequently leased to them by the company. The court did not hesitate to impute ownership of the property to the two defendants, which rendered them in violation of a criminal statute. In the court’s view, the corporate form cannot be used in such a transparent manner to circumvent the university regulations.

At first glance, the view expressed by the Leung Yat Ming court seems convincing. The court’s view was that the policy objective of a criminal statute should not be frustrated by the use of the corporate form. By choosing to criminalize certain conduct, the legislature has indicated the reprehensibility of that conduct and the importance of deterring it. The legislature’s judgment should be honoured to the greatest extent possible, including by overriding the separate personality of companies. However, the contrary view is that given the moral stigma of a criminal conviction and the high burden of proof required of the prosecution in establishing a criminal offence, the corporate veil should not be lightly lifted.29 The defendants in Leung Yat Ming had not been put on adequate notice of the criminal consequences of their action.