George Tsoi Kin-pan is expected to finish his duties as sports commissioner on 4 October and begin supporting the government’s administrative-accountability process the following day. He is expected to serve alongside Benjamin Mok Kwan-yu, a former deputy secretary for security who has reportedly been assigned to handle the work.
The two officials are expected to become support staff for an investigation team under the Public Service Commission. Their tasks will include helping to examine administrative responsibility and preparing a report for the chief executive or relevant principal officials. The wider team may include senior civil servants and government employees hired under non-civil-service terms, and is expected to be dissolved once the investigation is complete.
The arrangement uses the second-level investigation mechanism under the department-head accountability system. The Public Service Commission can lead such an investigation when a department faces serious, broad or repeated systemic problems, or when the role of a department head may be involved. The team would identify those under examination and assess their responsibility before the relevant superior authority makes a final accountability decision.
The process follows a five-month independent commission inquiry into the fire, which held 30 hearing sessions. The hearings raised possible work deficiencies and alleged buck-passing involving the Housing Bureau unit responsible for independent checking, the Labour Department, the Hong Kong Fire Services Department and the Buildings Department.
Among the examples reported from the hearings were 16 Labour Department inspections that did not find workers smoking, the Hong Kong Fire Services Department’s repeated approval of extensions to the suspension of fire-hose-reel and fire-hydrant systems, and a scaffolding-net fire-resistance test that was approved after the netting was extinguished during the test.
Whether the process leads to disciplinary action will depend on the independent commission’s findings about individual responsibility. The Secretary for the Civil Service said in June that disciplinary procedures apply to individuals, meaning officials must first establish who within a department was responsible and how far that responsibility extended. The independent commission is expected to submit its report to the chief executive by the end of October.