A journalist at a pro-Beijing newspaper was bound over by a Hong Kong court for the next 12 months after government lawyers dropped their charge of making a false statement in the execution of his work duties.

Ta Kung Pao reporter Wong Wai-keung, 48, was spared a criminal record on Thursday, unlike another journalist Bao Choy, who was convicted of the same offense in her documentary about police misconduct.

Wong was instead placed under a HK$2,000 (US$260) bond along with a summons at West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts.

The Department of Justice initially alleged that Wong had falsely said he was seeking to resolve a transport-related matter when he accessed the vehicle registry last year. He was looking for information about a certain vehicle to write a report that claimed democracy supporters were harassing Beijing-loyal journalists.

Prosecutors told the court on Thursday that Wong’s case could be withdrawn because it was a one-off incident and he was searching the registry as an employee. They also noted that he had a clean record.

The prosecution’s differential treatment prompted Principal Magistrate Ivy Chui to ask whether Wong and Choy were treated equally. Prosecutor Vincent Lee insisted that the two cases were handled consistently. He said the different outcomes might have been caused by the fact that the two cases were handled by “different law enforcement teams.”

Choy, a freelance producer with the embattled public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong, was recently found guilty of two similar charges. She was fined HK$6,000 and given a criminal record.

The crime she committed was in making the same “transport matters” declaration in order to view the registry to produce a report that was critical of the police’s handling of a mob attack at the Yuen Long train station at the height of anti-government protests in 2019.

The ruling provoked outrage among journalists, as they were currently given no option of declaring their journalistic identity in soliciting information from the government’s car database. People also saw the authorities’ approach, in pursuing the case and detaining her for interrogation, as an attack on freedom of the press. Choy has appealed against the ruling.

RTHK, meanwhile, is facing allegations of bad governance. Some of its reporters, deemed critical of the government, have reportedly been forced to leave.

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