Tom Grundy

The striking thing for anyone is that this is under the securities law.

Things are quite different.

He was denied his first choice of lawyer.

The judges are handpicked and basically approved by the city's leader.

There is no jury and not really bail.

It's almost a perfect record of guilty convictions.

He comes from a very humble background.

He's from China.

He arrived in Hong Kong, not an atypical story, age 12, on a fishing boat.

He was a child labourer in a garment factory, eventually just working his way up to become a clothing tycoon.

But particularly since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, he became a media tycoon with a colourful, grubby, sensational tabloid a lot of the time.

But as the years passed, it did investigative journalism and firmly sided with the democracy movement.

We have seen newsrooms raided, journalists arrested, a thousand reporters out of work, some other editors, some Stan News were jailed last year for 21 months, and dozens of civil society groups, let alone a dozen odd news outlets, have shut down in recent years.

So not exactly what we signed up for 10 years ago.