Security Minister Dan Jarvis said the men’s activities were “an infringement of our sovereignty and will never be tolerated”.
“We will continue to hold China to account and challenge them directly for actions which put the safety of people in our country at risk,” he added.
The jury could not agree on a charge against both men of foreign interference by forcing entry into the home of an alleged fraud suspect originally from Hong Kong in West Yorkshire.
The prosecution said it would not be seeking a retrial. The defendants were remanded into custody to be sentenced on a date to be fixed on 15 May.
Wai started working as a Border Force officer at Heathrow Airport in December 2020, which gave him access to a vast database of information about foreign nationals in the UK.
He searched it on his days off and sick days, earning money on the side by tracking Hong Kongers who had fled pro-democracy crackdowns for his Chinese contacts. There seems to have been no checks on his access to the database to prevent him doing this.
But he had been providing information on dissidents before then, referring to them in messages as “cockroaches”.
Yuen became his contact with Chinese authorities. A former Hong Kong police officer, he worked as the office manager of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office (HKETO) in London.
The pair were introduced in 2017 and by the middle of 2021, Yuen had become Wai’s handler – to whom he reported to directly about the activities of Hong Kong dissidents and pro-democracy protesters in the UK.
The court also heard “special attention” was paid to British politicians, such as Conservative MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith.
Head of Counter Terrorism Policing London Cdr Helen Flanagan said the pair’s activity had been “both sinister and chilling”.
