Peter Humphrey: 'I was only trying to help'

Humphrey and his wife Yu Yingzeng are to be tried at Shanghai No 1 Intermediate People's Court on 8 August on a charge of illegally obtaining personal information of Chinese citizens.

"When I became a business consultant 16 years ago, I concentrated on helping distressed companies and individuals who were victims of crime. This I also considered a public service, right up until 10 July last year, and I still do," Humphrey wrote to his son Harvey. The letter, dated 9 June, was passed on to British consular officials, a family friend said. The letter was seen by the South China Morning Post.​

"This was not in his handwriting because he has difficulty writing due to his worsening arthritis. It is believed to have been dictated to a cellmate,” the family friend said.

Humphrey, who is British, and Yu, a Chinese-born US citizen, were detained in Shanghai in July last year while conducting investigations for British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The couple founded a Shanghai-based risk consultancy called ChinaWhys, which has been closed.

The letter said: "I have been thinking a lot recently about the importance of public service and my own spirit of service throughout my lifetime. In my 18 years of journalism with the SCMP and Reuters, I always considered my work to be a public service, championing the underdogs and informing the world."

Humphrey was an external contributor to the South China Morning Post from May 2003 to March 2004. He spent two decades as a correspondent with Reuters in Asia, eastern Europe and the Balkans in the 1980s and 1990s. In April 2013, senior GSK executives hired Humphrey to investigate a suspected whistle-blower who alleged bribery in GSK's China operations.

His letter said he was inspired by US president Theodore Roosevelt's campaign in the early 1900s against corruption and other abuses in the United States. "Rooting out corruption and many other abuses from American society, business and politics, he changed the world," Humphrey wrote. ■