A mainland Chinese student charged with using a fake certificate from an Ivy League university in the US to get into a top Hong Kong institution has hired a senior defence counsel and requested a court adjournment.
As she returned to Sha Tin Court on Friday, Li Sixuan, 28, said that newly-hired senior counsel Martin Hui Siu-ting would need more time to negotiate with the prosecution over her three criminal charges.
Li was charged with making a false statement for the purpose of obtaining an entry permit, obtaining services by deception and possessing a false instrument.
She claimed she got a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics from Columbia University and submitted false credentials to the Immigration Department in June 2022.
She used the alleged false documents to apply for the Master of Arts Applied Linguistics programme at the University of Hong Kong, into which she was accepted.
The mainland student’s legal representative told Acting Principal Magistrate Cheang Kei-hong that the defendant had changed lawyers after the last adjournment in February and wanted senior counsel Hui to defend her.