Chinese broadcaster failed to pay Ofcom £300,000 for rule breaches, court told

A Chinese broadcaster has failed to pay Ofcom £300,000 in fines years after being found to have committed “serious and repeated” breaches of broadcasting rules, the High Court has been told.

Star China Media Limited (SCML) previously ran an English-language news channel named China Global Television Network (CGTN), formerly known as CCTV News, but was stripped of its licence in February 2021.

Ofcom found that SCML did not have “editorial responsibility” for CGTN’s news service, which was instead “controlled by a body which is ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party”.

The regulator is now taking legal action against SCML after it failed to pay three £100,000 fines for breaches of its Broadcasting Code related to fairness and privacy, arising from programmes broadcast between 2013 and 2019.

Barristers for Ofcom told a hearing on Thursday that SCML should be ordered to pay the fines and interest following the “clear-cut failures of compliance”.

Lawyers for SCML claim that the “enormous” fines are “disproportionate, arbitrary and unlawful” and could not act as a “deterrence” due to the firm already having lost its licence.

The first of the three fines related to two programmes from 2013 and 2014 about British investigator Peter Humphrey, who was detained in Shanghai.

Ofcom upheld Mr Humphrey’s complaint that the programmes included footage of him which falsely made it appear that he was voluntarily confessing to crimes.

SCML was also fined £100,000 each for breaches of fairness and privacy rules in relation to broadcasts in 2016, 2018 and 2019 concerning Hong Kong political activists Minhai Gui and Simon Cheng.

Announcing the sanctions in 2021, Ofcom said that in Mr Gui and Mr Cheng’s cases, CGTN had failed to take “appropriate steps to satisfy itself that material facts had not been presented, disregarded or omitted in a way that was unfair” to the individuals involved.

In written submissions for the hearing in London, David Glen, for the regulator, said that it had considered whether or not to impose the fines, given that SCML had lost its licence and “presented no risk of non-compliance”.

He said: “In Ofcom’s view, however, the need to promote deterrence across the wider broadcasting industry meant that it was important that financial penalties were seen to be imposed and enforced for breaches of this significance.

“The deterrent effect of the penalties would only be truly effective in the eyes of other broadcasters if they were seen to be set and enforced at the same level that would have been imposed on Star China if it had continued to hold a broadcast licence.”

In court, Mr Glen said that the sanctions followed “fundamentally separate complaints” about programmes which “gave rise to different breaches of the code spanning more than six years”.

John Stables, for SCML, said in written arguments that the company did not challenge Ofcom’s findings that the programmes had breached its rules, but opposed the imposition of the fines.

The barrister said there was “no rational basis” to impose the second and third fines as they “could not have added any greater disincentive” to breaches of the code, and “the point as to wider deterrence had been made”.

He said: “The reasoning for such treatment of repetition in the Gui and Cheng penalties is irrational and absurd.”

“Bluntly, the repetition by Ofcom of penalties reasoned on the basis of wider deterrence, in circumstances in which no component of deterrence could apply to SCML itself, because it held no licence, was gratuitous, disproportionate and unlawful.”

The trial before Mr Justice Jay is due to conclude on Friday.