Hong Kong anti-corruption agency arrests 22 people over HK$2 million mortgage fee fraud

Hong Kong’s anti-corruption agency has arrested 22 individuals, including 18 bank employees who allegedly accepted HK$2 million (US$257,372) in bribes from an intermediary to defraud referral fees in mortgage loan applications.

The 13 men and nine women, aged between 31 and 56, were arrested across more than 30 locations earlier this month.

Aside from the 18 frontline local bank staff, the remaining four people were spouses of the staff and an associates of them.

They faced allegations of accepting or offering bribes, money laundering and conspiracy to defraud, according to principal investigator Grace Yee Hin-lai, of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC).

To apply for a property mortgage loan, applicants would either go directly through a bank or via a referral intermediary. In the latter case, the bank is required to pay a referral fee to the intermediary, chief investigator Murphy Chan Tak-fai said.

In this case, the arrested bank employees had allegedly colluded with an intermediary to include referral application forms in documents prepared for mortgage loan applicants for their signing, in which some were discovered to contain suspected forged signatures, Chan added.

“The intermediary had allegedly offered HK$2 million in bribes to frontline bank employees to mislead 10 banks in more than 200 property mortgage loan applications. ICAC investigations revealed that the applicants had no knowledge of the mortgage referrals,” an ICAC statement said.