Ordinary Gweilo

The SCMP sometimes manages to find interesting stories for the Sunday edition.  Not often, but it does happen.

Today they report the strange tale of a man trapped in Hong Kong because he hasn’t paid his tax:

Bill Heywood, a plumbing and piping contractor, was stopped at Hong Kong International Airport last September when he was leaving the city after a three-week holiday. He was told by immigration officials that he could not leave until he had settled his bill for HK$50,782.

He has now been stuck in the city for a year, unable to pay the bill and yet unable to find a job and escape his plight.

Heywood said he wanted to find work to pay for the debt, as he did not have enough cash left at the end of his holiday. “But the Immigration Department staff won’t give me a work permit. I have talked to them many times, and each time they said I couldn’t get one.”

The IRD spokeswoman said “the issue of a work permit is not within the purview of IRD”.

To obtain a visa, Heywood was told he must first have a job offer. The Immigration Department said a work permit may be issued to an expatriate applicant if he had no serious criminal record and a degree or otherwise good technical or professional qualifications. And there should be a genuine job vacancy and a confirmed offer for a job that could not be readily taken up by the local workforce.

The best bit comes at the end of the story:

“My friend has now offered me a job,” he said. “I wrote to the Immigration Department a couple of weeks ago for permission to work.”  The problem now is that Heywood’s visa has expired. He was last allowed to stay until April, but Heywood said he did not seek further extensions because he could not afford the fees.

“I asked for a longer extension to sort things out, but they only gave me one month and they charge me HK$160 each time,” he said. “I don’t have HK$160 to pay each month.”

While declining to comment on Heywood’s situation, the Immigration Department spokeswoman said people who had breached their conditions of stay, including overstayers, would be repatriated as soon as possible, or, if they were prosecuted for overstaying, after they had served their sentence.

As usual with the SCMP, the story is not well-written.  The intro should say that he has finally found a job but is not allowed to take it and may be deported for over-staying. 

Incidentally, whilst on the subject of Hong Kong’s finest English language daily, they appear to have quietly dropped ‘Education Post’, only a few months after re-designing it and moving it to Friday.