From what I have heard, the whole AbouThai affair was required by the Chinese Communist Party officials and it has been push from the HK Government to the custom services to make a raid against AbouThai to disturb their business and to be used as a reason to make further investigation on the company so that it will be convenient to expand allegations of other crimes.
The CCP is aiming the Yellow side and will take any opportunity to hit against them, starting with a simple misstep that in normal cases would just result in a warning, but as it’s a Yellow business it has to be a lot more severe punishment and always with the threat of coming back with made up crimes to get the out of business.
Things are completely different if you are supporting the communist terror, so called Blue side, then hundreds of products mislabeled as at Best Mart 360 will just get one custom officer to make a visit at one site and just give a warning.
Being Blue also gives you the fast way trough the customs if you have to cross the border, so there are benefits to support communist terror.
The Hong Kong Liaison Office has also provided a Yellow list to the Customs office, those entities that are listed on the list will be raided if there is a minor complaint made against them, there are an unspoken list of Blue entities that are more or less kept free of visits from the Customs office, even if there would be major complaints, as Grandpa don’t want to loose face again if the Customs would find a US fighter aircraft in a container heading to the mainland.
The irony of the AbouThai raid, most of the Custom officers are “Yellow” or people who dislike to give Blue’s special special treatment, so they are punished with doing atrocities against the Yellow businesses, the Liaison Office thought it was a good punishment and hope it would split the Yellow community and make it weaker.
I know most of the things are hearsay, but it’s difficulty to not snap up things when people have phone calls at the dinner table…