Surveillance sank his injury claim, but his employer's own case boomeranged
Deputy District Judge Benny Lo ruled on 12 August 2026 that a school's fight against an injury claim helped cause the employee's depression.
The applicant, the school's human resources manager since 2016 and earning about HKD 70,000 a month, slipped on packs of A4 paper in a filing room on 26 August 2020, fell, and struck his neck and spine against a cabinet behind him. He spent seven days in hospital.
The Employees' Compensation (Ordinary Assessment) Board initially certified three years of sick leave and a loss of earning capacity of just over 10 per cent. The school appealed under section 18 of the Employees' Compensation Ordinance, at first disputing that the accident had even occurred. In its Answer, filed in February 2023, the school pleaded that the applicant "has not sustained any accident as such." Only on 27 August 2025, weeks before trial, did the school admit liability, leaving the extent of compensation as the sole issue at trial.
To test the applicant's account, the school hired three private investigation firms, which carried out covert surveillance between January 2021 and March 2023. The footage showed him walking briskly, at times with his crutches not touching the ground, climbing stairs, turning quickly and squatting at a vending machine. An orthopaedic surgeon retained by the school, who examined the applicant twice, concluded his complaints could not be fully explained by his injuries, writing that "symptom exaggeration, intentional or unintentional, could not be ruled out."
The applicant, in Judge Lo's assessment, was an honest witness who had not set out to mislead the court, though he tended to exaggerate and leaned on memory rather than his own medical records. Against the surveillance footage and the contemporaneous treatment notes, the surgeon's opinion carried more weight than either the applicant's account or the board's certificate. Orthopaedic sick leave was cut to just under eight months, and loss of earning capacity fixed at 4 per cent, once a 50 per cent deduction the surgeon had applied for pre-existing degeneration was thrown out, a deduction the Court of Final Appeal has already ruled impermissible.
The psychiatric claim fared differently. Major depressive disorder linked to the accident was accepted as a diagnosis, with sick leave fixed at just under seven months and loss of earning capacity at 2 per cent. Crucially, the depression was not traced to the accident alone: pain, fear of losing his job, financial hardship, and years of the school's pleadings accusing him of fabricating the accident all fed into it. As the judgment put it, a litigant accused for years of inventing his own accident "can hardly be faulted for feeling aggrieved by that experience."
Combining both heads, total sick leave came to just under fifteen months and total loss of earning capacity to 6 per cent, well below the board's original figures. The applicant was awarded a combined total of roughly HKD 149,800 under sections 9, 10 and 10A of the ordinance, along with interest and costs. A separate claim for supplements and tonic food, worth roughly HKD 90,000, was withdrawn during the trial as not recoverable under the ordinance.
The judgment makes clear that the school's compensation exposure did not end with the surveillance evidence that cut the applicant's physical injury award. The same pleadings the school used to resist liability were, in Judge Lo's own findings, part of what caused the psychiatric injury it was ultimately ordered to compensate.
