Renovation workers at fire-hit Wang Fuk Court continued to smoke despite property management demanding the project’s contractor fix the problem, a property officer has told a public inquiry.
Cheng Tsz-ying, a property officer from ISS EastPoint Properties, which managed the residential estate in Tai Po, testified before an independent committee tasked with investigating the fire on Thursday. She said her company had no control over the renovation workers hired by the project’s prime contractor, Prestige Construction & Engineering.
Victor Dawes, the committee’s chief lawyer, previously said this Smoking was “most likely” the cause of the fire that erupted on November 26 and raged for 43 hours, killing 168 people. The residents have also witnessed this they saw workers smoking and made numerous complaintsbut to no avail.
A project meeting minutes from March 2025 showed that ISS and the Wang Fuk Court owners’ committee raised the issue with Prestige and gave it a month to improve, including designating a smoking area.
But Cheng told the hearing that things “barely improved” afterwards. She said that other complaints about the collection of garbage and construction debris also did not lead to significant changes.
Dawes asked Cheng if it was fair to describe ISS’s role as a “mouthpiece” – that of relaying residents’ complaints to Prestige.
“I can only say that we could not control the Prestige workers. We could not fire them,” Cheng said in Cantonese.
She added that Prestige had pledged to fire workers who smoked on the job, but admitted she did not know whether the construction firm had enforced the rule.
Cheng, who was appointed to the Wang Fuk Trial in 2018, was the most senior officer from the ISS to testify at the public inquiry. When questioned by Dawes, she said she did not know why her immediate supervisor, manager Lai Wing-lee, did not choose to testify.
Water tanks on the ceiling
Earlier this week, an executive and a senior employee of Victory Fire Engineering, a fire safety contractor for Wang Fuk Court, testified that they discovered the property’s alarm system had been disabled before the fire and asked Cheng to provide a “shutdown notice,” which notifies the Department of Fire Services of a deactivation.
Cheng disagreed with the couple’s accounts on Thursday, saying they asked her to show the official announcement after the fire broke out on November 26.
In July last year, ISS employees turned off the main switch of Wang Fuk Court’s fire safety system at the request of Prestige, which intended to carry out repairs to the water tanks on the roof.
WhatsApp message logs from October showed that Cheng texted Victory Fire director Chung Kit-man that the water tanks had been refilled. On November 21, Cheng sent him 15 photos that appeared to show full tanks.
However, at least two photographs appeared to have been taken before November, in August and September respectively. Dawes said there was no evidence that the tanks had been refilled at the time of the fire.
Cheng said she got the photos from her junior colleague, Lok Sin-ying, and sent them to Chung. She added that she did not know if the tanks were actually full.
Proxy vote
Cheng also admitted that ISS had no mechanism to verify the votes of the representatives at the Wang Fuk Court owners’ committee meetings.
The inquest heard on Wednesday that proxy votes were “very common” at owners’ meetings and that they were difficult to verify.
Residents had also filed at least nine complaints with the Department of Internal Affairs about alleged fraudulent proxy votes, Dawes said during Thursday’s hearing.
However, ISS did not receive a written complaint about the issue, Cheng said, adding that the management office had “barely” discussed how to improve the screening of fake votes.
Sessions are set to resume next week after the Easter holiday and the Ching Ming Festival.
