MEDIA tycoon Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison today for collusion with foreign forces to destabilise Hong Kong.

Mr Lai, nicknamed the “Murdoch of Asia” because of his extensive media empire and neoconservative views, had long used his newspapers to attack the Chinese government and whip up hostility to immigrants in the Chinese special administrative region, which was a British colony from 1842-1997.

He was arrested in 2020, following his 2019 meetings with then US vice-president Mike Pence and secretary of state Mike Pompeo when seeking support for anti-government riots in Hong Kong, which saw attacks on the public transport network, shopping centres and trade union offices.

US funding for Hong Kong protest groups via the National Endowment for Democracy ran to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the late 1990s on. The scale of its support for the 2019 riots was exposed when it froze $2 million (£1.46m) in funding for Hong Kong groups while restructuring the state-controlled US Agency for Global Media in June 2020.