Hong Kong’s leader apologized on Thursday for a deadly fire last year and said his housing secretary had resigned, in an effort to offer accountability for a disaster that drew outrage and created a political challenge for his Beijing-backed government.
“The fire brought sadness and misery to us,” said John Lee, Hong Kong’s chief executive, at a news conference. Flanked by seven other officials, Mr. Lee bowed to the assembled media and added, “I apologize.”
The gesture was notable coming from a government that was quick to crack down on expression in the weeks after the deadly fire, which killed 168 people at the Wang Fuk Court housing complex in northern Hong Kong last November. But Mr. Lee also vehemently defended the government in a testy question-and-answer session on Thursday as he was asked, several times, about his own accountability.
The resignation of the housing secretary, Winnie Ho, was the first by a senior official following months of questions over the culpability of Hong Kong’s leaders. Mr. Lee stopped short of blaming her directly, adding that “the fire did not involve any personal wrongdoing by the secretary,” but said that she should “bear political responsibility.”
He primarily blamed collusion and corruption in the construction industry for the fire, saying that construction insiders with connections to organized crime groups known as triads had been responsible for shoddy repair work that led up to it. Mr. Lee said the government would hold criminally accountable anyone who was found guilty of rigging a construction bid.
The seven buildings that burned in the blaze had been undergoing government-mandated repairs and were shrouded in netting that was later found to be substandard. The authorities said the netting and polystyrene foam that was used to protect windows was responsible for the rapid spread of the fire, which burned with such intensity that it took thousands of firefighters two days to put out the blaze.
For months before the fire, residents had raised concerns about the safety of the netting and other materials and complained about workers smoking near construction debris.
Mr. Lee promised at the conference on Thursday to reform and amend regulations over building maintenance, and he announced a cross-departmental task force on bid-rigging that would bring in officials from the police and the city’s anti-corruption agency.
For more than an hour, Mr. Lee faced questions from local media outlets over whether he should be held accountable and whether he should have offered an apology a year ago, immediately after the fire. It underscored the pressure on Mr. Lee to demonstrate that his government remains in control of a crisis of this scale, even as Hong Kong faces greater oversight by Beijing following a political overhaul.
Mr. Lee on Thursday also released the first official report from an investigation into the disaster. The report, compiled in two volumes of more than 1,100 pages, followed an inquiry led by a government-appointed committee. The panel submitted its final report to Mr. Lee last week after months of hearings and deliberations that exposed major oversights and failures by the agencies charged with overseeing the construction industry.
The report cited the discovery of consultants and contractors with “dubious backgrounds,” including those with triad connections, and a “widespread, systemic and longstanding practice” in the construction industry to “manipulate the outcome” of government bids. It said that many homeowners “lack the expertise” to make informed decisions, making them vulnerable to bid manipulation.
The government’s report singled out four government bodies for their lack of oversight: the Fire Services Department, the Buildings Department, the Labor Department and the Independent Checking Unit, which Ms. Ho oversaw as the head of the housing authority.
While some previous homeowner complaints at Wang Fuk Court prompted the authorities to inspect the site and even issue warnings and citations to the contractor, government agencies failed to make changes that might have prevented the devastating fire. At one point before it broke out, an official told residents that the risk of fire from the netting around the scaffolding was “relatively low.”
In June, the government charged seven people and two companies with 25 offenses, including manslaughter, conspiracy to defraud, money laundering, attempting to pervert the course of justice and tax evasion. They were the first charges to be brought after the inquiry.
Wang Fuk Court, built in 1983, was home to more than 4,900 residents, many of them from working-class families who had purchased their subsidized apartments through a government housing program. In 2016, the government ordered homeowners to fix the facade of the buildings and replace aging doors and equipment to bring everything up to code, part of a citywide program that required older buildings to undergo inspection and repair.
But the program also turned out to be rife with corruption.
Contractors and consultants grouped into cartels in order to win lucrative contracts, the report said. The government had already been aware of the potential for corruption when residents were given the official notification for widespread repairs. They went ahead anyway.
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