Hong Kong

A 35-year-old in-house compliance officer working for Bank of America Merrill Lynch is facing assault charges in Hong Kong after an incident involving police officers.*

Samuel Bickett, an American, appeared before the Eastern Magistrates' Courts on Monday morning, charged with one count of common assault and one count of assaulting a police officer. The court will hear the case on February 4 and Bickett has been released on bail. He is able to leave Hong Kong, according to local press reports.

Local newspaper HK01 reported that Bickett was accused of attacking an off-duty police officer and a passer-by at Causeway Bay MTR station in Hong Kong on Saturday. The police officer and the passer-by were reportedly trying to stop another man from jumping the turnstiles without a ticket.

In a video shared on social media, which does not show the entire event, a different Caucasian man was in a heated exchange with a Chinese man with a baton, asking the latter to show identification. Bickett was shown in the video attempting to grab the baton and subsequently subdued the Chinese man, who identified himself as a police officer. The video also showed Bickett hitting the man whom he had pinned down on the ground. Bickett and the man then both got up and held onto the baton until a uniformed police officer arrived.

Last month, a banker with Citigroup, a director in the bank's capital markets business, was arrested after an incident involving police officers, and in September, BNP Paribas issued an apology after one of its employees made pro-protest posts on social media.

According to a LinkedIn profile, Bickett joined Bank of America Merrill Lynch in June as director of Asia-Pacific anti-bribery and anti-corruption compliance. Before that, he spent two years in an intensive Mandarin Chinese learning programme in Taiwan. Between 2014 and 2016, he practised as a senior disputes associate with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer's Hong Kong office and was also seconded to Deutsche Bank's anti-corruption programme in Singapore. He came to Hong Kong in 2010 with Ropes & Gray, where he practised for four years. Earlier in his career, he worked as a staff attorney at the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders in Boston.

A Hong Kong-based representative for Bank of America declined to comment.

Life in Hong Kong has been tense and demonstrations have sometimes turned violent. But since last month's local elections, in which pro-Beijing candidates were largely defeated, the violence has subsided. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of marchers took to the streets in central Hong Kong with children, in a largely peaceful demonstration demanding greater freedom and democracy.

*Correction 12/10: An earlier version of this story identified Bickett as an in-house lawyer with Bank of America. In fact, Bickett, despite his legal training and qualification, is a compliance officer with the bank. The headline and first paragraph of this story have been modified to reflect that.