[top - CENTRE OF ATTENTION: Edison Chen (centre) is surrounded by security as he leaves British Columbia Supreme Court in Vancouver on Monday.]
SCANDAL-HIT singer Edison Chen checked into Vancouver's luxury River Rock Casino Resort as early as Saturday to get ready for his appearance in a Canadian court yesterday.
The Hong Kong-Canadian movie star took photos while having sex with a string of female celebrities which included Canto-pop star Gillian Chung, actress Cecilia Cheung and former actress Bobo Chan.
They were put online in late January last year without his knowledge. Sze Ho Chun, a computer technician, is now on trial in Hong Kong for illegally posting the sex photos online.
Edison's choice of the suite on the ninth floor costs between 1,400 to 5,000 Canadian dollars ($1,700 to $6,100) a night, reported Hong Kong's Apple Daily.
It is believed that Edison took up all the four suites on the ninth floor.
But if you think Edison is a big spender, that is nowhere close to what the Hong Kong government is spending just to get his testimony.
Edison, who will be in Singapore this week to attend events by a burger chain and a sports brand, had refused to return to Hong Kong.
So, a team of five from Hong Kong, including lawyers and a magistrate, flew to Canada to get it.
A Vancouver television station interviewed a local lawyer, who said that it was very rare for a court venue in Vancouver to be used for a Hong Kong case, and that the costs would be high.
The rental charge for the court venue was about 500 to 1,000 Canadian dollars.
The daily expenses involved in hiring the security staff for crowd control is about 5,000 to 10,000 Canadian dollars. This is on top of the costs involved in flying the Hong Kong team for the trial.
Finished in a day
Fortunately, the trial scheduled for five days was completed in one day.
Hong Kong's Department of Justice confirmed that it was paying all the expenses of the proceedings because the hearing was taking place at the request of the prosecution.
It would not say how much those expenses were, reported the South China Morning Post.
A spokesman said it would cover its own costs, those of the judiciary and the defendant's lawyers.
Defence lawyer Kelvin Lai said the government had provided a 'reasonable sum' by way of allowances for the trip.
The decision to fly over the legal team and the intensity of the original police investigation have been criticised in Hong Kong, with some claiming the case has garnered special attention because of Edison's celebrity status.
Civic Party lawmaker Ronny Tong Ka Wah, a lawyer and former Bar Association chairman, described the overseas hearing as 'expensive and luxurious' when there was an easy and more economical way to collect evidence from the star.
'I find taking a deposition in a foreign court quite a drain on our resources. I estimate this will cost a few hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars, if not a million,' he said.
He said it would be cheaper to set up a video link in a Hong Kong court to hear Edison's evidence.
Yesterday, on the first day of the trial, Edison appealed to the traditional value of chivalry in an attempt to diffuse questioning in court about the sexually explicit photos.
'I decided today not to answer any questions of an intimate nature regarding any of the girls,' the 28-year-old Vancouver-born star said defiantly before he was cross-examined.
'I'm determined to protect their innocence. They have suffered enough,' Edison said.
'I believe it is wrong to them, for me to state facts that I believe are irrelevant to this case.'
But later in the afternoon, he made an about turn and named four of the women involved in the scandal. (See report on other page.)
Edison, dressed in a dark conservative suit and tie, responded aggressively to questioning in court, reported the Globe and Mail.
'Everything' was consensual
He said 'everything' was consensual.
'There was nothing forced. This is a matter between two people who agreed to something,' he said.
Edison told the court he is a private person, reportedAP.
'This was never meant for anyone else to see.'
Some of the pages hosting the photos at the time received more than 25 million hits, and the celebrity feeding frenzy crashed the web in Hong Kong.
Edison said the images were released in spurts.
'It was more of an attack, a well-planned attack in the way these images were released,' he said.
He had taken hundreds of photos with a number of women from 2001 to 2006.
He told the court he believed the photos, which were stored digitally on his computer, were copied when he took the computer to a shop for repairs in 2006, reported the Globe and Mail.
Deleted files
He believed he had erased the files by putting them into the trash, before the machine was taken to the repair shop.
'I did not know about encrypted data or securing the trash. In my opinion, when you delete a file and put it in the trash bin, it was deleted,' he said, adding that he later found out that files deleted from the trash could be recovered in some cases.
'They invaded my privacy and stole my things in a very direct way,' Edison told the court.
On 29 Jan 2008, he said his friends started contacting him about the images circulating on the Internet.
'This was a very huge shock to me,' Chen told the court.
A month later, a police inspector showed him a compact disk of photographs.
'Of course, I had seen these pictures. I took these pictures.
'They were in my personal computer,' he said.
After giving his testimony, Edison was surrounded by several burly men from a private security firm as he walked through the courthouse, reported the Globe and Mail.
As his motorcade of two cars was rushing out of the courthouse parking lot, bodyguards knocked two reporters to the ground and pushed a photographer into a police cruiser.
