COURT: The jury have convicted you of three counts of indecent assault, one attempted rape and one rape. The offences took place between 15 July 2011 and 31 August of that year. The victim was the maid who worked where you lived.
The aggravating feature of your conduct was the sexual exploitation of someone in such a vulnerable position. You knew that your victim had just come to Hong Kong for the first time from Indonesia. You cannot but have known that she had no one to turn to, that she was a stranger in a strange land; she had a limited education; she was unable to speak the language properly and she was ignorant of our system and its remedies and she was locked into her job by the need to work off a seven-month debt to her employment agency and she was fearful of the powers of her employers who controlled her life.
Your counsel sensibly limits his mitigation to pointing out there was no bad violence and there was no injury. I take that into consideration but the fact is, those factors I have just outlined to you meant that you did not have to use any violence. Those circumstances allowed you to force yourself upon her and it gave you the confidence to repeat your conduct, well knowing that it was against her wishes and without her consent.
You have displayed no shred of remorse. The damage you did to your victim will doubtless live with her for the rest of her life. She has waited a year and nine months for this trial, not allowed to work and living off charity. Without the courage to go to the witness-box yourself, you have listened to her in this court be cross-examined for more than a day. Those matters that made her vulnerable were used against her to discredit her. The anguish and difficulty she must have experienced of not knowing how to deal with your conduct was turned back against her to suggest dishonesty and a desire to seduce you for thoroughly wicked ends. You knew the truth but you sat there and watched it happen in an effort to save yourself.
I wish to make it absolutely clear that your sentence is not increased by a day because you chose to fight the case. I am not allowed to do that. However, the point is that your decision to accuse her and fight the case rather than indicate remorse and apology, denies you any mercy at my hands now.
On the 2nd count on the indictment, indecent assault, you will go to prison for 3 years.
For the attempted rape, you will go to prison for 4½ years - that was Count 3.
For the indecent assaults on Counts 4 and 5, there will be sentences of 3 years on each. All of those sentences will run concurrently.
On the final count, number 6, of rape, there will be a sentence of 6½ years’ imprisonment.
I have to set a sensible total for the whole of your conduct. I judge that the sensible total is one of 7½ years’ imprisonment. I shall achieve that by ordering the sentences on Counts 2 to 5 to run together concurrently and the sentence of 6½ years for rape on Count 6 will commence to run after the first 12 months of those concurrent sentences has expired. The result is a sentence of 7½ years.