Hong Kong independent bookseller Pong Yat-ming has been found guilty of running an unregistered school after holding a Spanish interest class at his bookstore, Book Punch, last year.

Pong and his firm, Active Experiential Learning Company, which owns Book Punch, were fined a total of HK$32,000 at Kowloon City Magistrates’ Courts on Friday.

Before handing down the fine, Magistrate Arthur Lam said he had found them guilty of five charges alleging that Pong and the company ran an unregistered school and allowed a person without a permit to teach.

The charges relate to a Spanish interest class held at Book Punch in April last year, with 12 participants being taught by a tutor named Antonio Baro Montane at the Sham Shui Po bookstore.

Magistrate Lam said the case centred around whether Book Punch met the definition of a school under the city’s Education Ordinance, which defines a school as an institution that provides formal education or “any other educational course by any means” for 20 people or more in a day, or eight people or more at one time.

Lam rejected the defence’s argument that an educational course must involve an assessment mechanism, such as exams, or lead to an academic qualification.

“A course is concerned about progress or… a series of lessons about a particular topic,” Lam said in Cantonese.

“In this case, it was obvious that Montane was teaching and the [students] were learning,” he said.

He also rejected the defence’s submission that Pong was led to believe that an interest class did not require registration because of a 2017 remark by ex-education chief Kevin Yeung.

At the time, Yeung said in a written reply to a lawmaker at the Legislative Council that interest classes such as those teaching dance and acting would not require school registration “because they are interests.”

Lam said Yeung’s remark came with a precondition that an interest class does not provide educational activities.

“The Spanish class in question offers information on basic grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, as well as common phrases for travelling,” the magistrate said. “These are clearly educational content.”

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Defence lawyer Lawrence Lau said during the mitigation hearing on Friday, ahead of sentencing, that Pong’s interest class was small in scale and short-lived, adding that it did not receive complaints about educational quality or potential fire safety violations.

Lau also said that, in the past year, Book Punch had been operating at a loss, with Pong subsidising the bookstore with HK$20,000 from his own savings each month.

Lam ordered an HK$8,000 fine for each of the three offences relating to the operation of an unregistered school, and a HK$4,000 fine for each of the two remaining offences concerning the unregistered teacher.

The maximum of the offence of running an unregistered school is up to two years in prison and a fine of HK$250,000. Allowing a person to teach without a permit carries a maximum of two years’ imprisonment and a HK$50,000 fine.