1. The 1st Appellant set up a company which offered “representative visiting services” to family and friends of prisoners on remand awaiting trial (“PATs”) detained in Lai Chi Kok Reception Centre (“LCKRC”). The 2nd Appellant was employed by the 1st Appellant to provide the visiting services. Each Appellant completed Visit Request Slips for the purpose of gaining entry as visitors to PATs in LCKRC indicating they were a “friend” of the PATs in question. 2. The Appellants, with others, were charged with and convicted of conspiracy to defraud officers of the Correctional Services Department (“CSD”) by dishonestly and falsely representing to those officers that each of them was a friend of a PAT at LCKRC, thereby inducing the officers to act contrary to their public duty, namely to grant them permission to visit the PAT which the officers would not otherwise have granted. 3. This appeal concerned the regime under the Prison Rules (Cap.234A) (the “Rules”) for visits to PATs. Rule 203, applicable specifically to PATs, permits such prisoners to receive “visitors”. Rule 48, applicable generally to all classes of prisoner unless inconsistent with rules for a particular class of prisoner, prohibits persons other than “relatives and friends” (except by special authority) to visit. The appeal raised the questions of (i) whether under those Rules visits to PATs are limited to their relatives and friends, and (ii) if so, whether under the visiting regime a PAT’s friends are limited only to those persons who are personal acquaintances and known to him so that, absent special authority, visits by strangers or persons he has not previously met are excluded in all cases and regardless of the purpose of the visit. The proper construction of Rule 203 4. The Court held that on its proper construction, the word “visitor” in Rule 203 means “relatives and friends” of PATs. To construe Rule 203 in context, it is necessary to have regard to the other rules. Rule 48, which only allows “relatives and friends” of a prisoner to visit him, must apply to PATs as well unless it is inconsistent with the rules relating to PATs. There is no inconsistency between Rule 48 and Rule 203 as to the identity of the persons who may visit and there is no reason in principle why there should be a difference in respect of the identity of visitors. 5. Next, the Court concluded that a wider definition should be given to the word “friends” to include persons in the position of the Appellants. A principled approach to determining the meaning of “friends” in the present case is to examine the word by reference to the purposes for which visits to PATs are made. The most important purpose of any prison visit to PATs is contact with persons outside the prison and the provision of moral and material support. But the purpose of visits to PATs is additionally to enable them to take advantage of the more liberal regime in which they are entitled to procure for themselves food and malt liquor, their own clothes, newspapers and other means of occupation. These entitlements are of no practical benefit if these things cannot actually be supplied to them. 6. The Appellants would, in these circumstances, properly be described from the point of view of the prisoner as his friends. This would be the case even if the services were contracted directly by the prisoner himself. 7. The Court considered that, as well as personal acquaintances, “friends” of such a PAT can also include a person: (a) who has been requested to visit the prisoner, either directly by the prisoner himself or indirectly through a relative or personal acquaintance of the prisoner; (b) who wishes to visit the prisoner in order to provide him with some moral or material benefit consistent with the statutory purposes of visits to that category of prisoner; and (c) by whom the prisoner is willing to be visited. If those conditions are satisfied, the visitor should, objectively, be regarded as a “friend” of the prisoner. 8. The putative “friend” of a prisoner must have a legitimate reason for visiting him and must be seeking to do so in good faith and not for some improper ulterior purpose. 9. Any person not fulfilling the three conditions might still wish to apply for special authority to visit a prisoner. Representatives of religious groups or other voluntary organisations are examples of persons who might fall into this category. It is also to be noted that the Rules themselves provide for visits by visiting justices and prison visitors. Substantial and grave injustice 10.As the charges against the Appellants were serious and involved dishonesty, it was appropriate to address them briefly, because there were two respects in which the evidence fell short of establishing necessary elements of the charge against the Appellants. 11.First, the evidence fell short of proving the element of dishonesty, which was fundamental to the alleged conspiracy to defraud. In determining if a defendant has made a dishonest misrepresentation, it is necessary to consider whether he honestly believed the misrepresentation to be true in the sense in which he understood it. 12.It is entirely possible that the Appellants might have believed that they were “friends” of the PATs whom they visited within the meaning of the Rules and were not dishonest. 13.Second, the evidence was also insufficient to support the existence of a conspiracy agreement. The mere fact that the Appellants were all from the same company does not support the conclusion that the only irresistible inference here was that they all agreed together that they would select the category “friend” to insert in the Visit Request Slips in order to induce the CSD staff to admit them as visitors. There were only two categories of relationship on the Visit Request Slips for them to complete. If they were not a “relative” of the prisoners, the only other possible status was “friend”. Conclusion 14. The Court allowed the Appellants’ appeals and quashed their convictions.