A Border Force official has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after being convicted of assisting a foreign state and misconduct in public office in relation to illegal surveillance work he undertook to help China.
Chi Leung Wai, aged 41, also known as Peter Wai, was an immigration officer at Heathrow Airport and worked as a special constable for City of London Police.
However, investigations by counter-terror police found that Wai and co-defendant Chung Biu Yuen, aged 66, were illegally gathering information for the benefit of Hong Kong and Chinese authorities.
Wai, of Staines-upon-Thames in Surrey, and Yuen – also known as Billy, of Hackney, in east London, were last month found guilty of assisting a foreign state, which is an offence under the National Security Act, following a trial at the Old Bailey.
Additionally, Wai was convicted of misconduct in public office because of his use of Home Office systems to collect data on suspected dissidents.
Yesterday, he was sentenced to six years imprisonment for National Security Act offences and four years for misconduct in public office, with the terms to be served consecutively.
Yuen, a former Hong Kong police officer who worked at the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London, was sentenced to eight years for offences under the National Security Act.
Jurors at the trial of the pair heard evidence that the trade office, which is the official overseas representative of the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, was used as a base through which Wai and Yuen’s operations were funded.
They were told that the men researched dissidents living in the UK, including exact addresses, what cars they drive and details of their social media accounts. Those dissidents were referred to as “cockroaches”.
The Hong Kong authorities also put bounties of up to £100,000 for information on pro-democracy campaigners that led to their whereabouts being identified or to their capture.
Wai and Yuen were arrested and charged following a May 2024 incident in which a flat in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, was broken into. It belonged to a woman who moved to the UK from Hong Kong in 2023.
Another man, a Border Force officer named Matthew Trickett, who was a friend of Wai’s, was also arrested as part of the counter-terror investigations at the time. He was charged alongside Wai and Yuen but was found dead in a park in Maidenhead days after being released on bail. An inquest into his death is pending.
The Home Office said Wai was immediately suspended from his duties following his arrest and subsequently dismissed from his job. Wai claimed he was simply carrying out legitimate private security work.
Detectives working for Counter Terrorism Policing London, which is a collaboration between the Metropolitan Police and City of London Police, found evidence that requests from Hong Kong were sent to Yuen and then “onward-tasked” to Wai and Trickett to carry out.
They said this work included requests from Hong Kong to Yuen for information about specific individuals. That person’s details were then passed from Yuen to Wai and officers found evidence of Wai carrying out illicit checks on Home Office systems for them.
Officers trawled through more than 20 terabytes of data as part of their investigation into communications between Yuen, Wai and Trickett – which included thousands of individual messages spanning multiple languages.
Cmdr Helen Flanagan, head of Counter Terrorism Policing London, said Wai and Yuen were targeting pro-democracy campaigners in the UK and sending highly sensitive details about them and their families to the Hong Kong authorities.
“Our investigation, along with the convictions and sentences show how seriously this kind activity is taken in the UK and that it will not be tolerated,” she said. “It should also serve as a warning to anyone else who might consider doing similar that it is simply not worth it and that when you are caught, you will likely face a lengthy prison sentence.
“I also hope this outcome reassures those living in the UK who may be concerned about being targeted by any foreign state, that we will take action to stop this from happening and that we will do everything we can to help keep them safe.”