The chairman of the Lan Kwai Fong Group, Allan Zeman, says businesses are on life-support and he is appealing to people to spend their HK$10,000 cash handout in their local communities, RTHK reports. The handout was pledged in last month's budget to help permanent residents weather the economic fallout, caused by months of protests followed by the coronavirus epidemic. Zeman, a major landlord in Hong Kong's Lan Kwai Fong bar area in Central, said the government had already given business concessions but it wasn't enough and that people had to spend. Zeman said he believed Hong Kong had done a great job in limiting people's exposure to the virus and that, in the area around Lan Kwai Fong, people had started to go back to the office and business was slowly returning. But he said, although he'd given many concessions to tenants, some businesses had not opened and some had closed, and that people were operating on a month to month basis.

Source: The Standard March 17, 2020 05:22 UTC