A top Hong Kong finance official and a lawmaker have pulled out of speaking at a bitcoin conference, reportedly because Eric Trump, a son of US President Donald Trump, is attending.
The speakers’ lineup for the Bitcoin Asia conference, held Thursday and Friday, previously included Eric Trump; Eric Yip, an executive director at the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC); and lawmaker Johnny Ng, according to the event’s website archived in early July.
Yip’s and Ng’s names are now absent from the list. A version of the website archived on Saturday already showed that their names had been removed.
Ng – who spoke at the event last year – and Yip would have appeared alongside Eric Trump, who is scheduled to headline the conference at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre event as executive vice president of his family’s company, The Trump Organization.
Trump “also spearheads some of the country’s largest cryptocurrency ventures,” his speaker bio states.
The South China Morning Post cited two anonymous sources who attributed the withdrawal to Eric Trump, with one saying that lawmakers were instructed “not to attend the forum that also features Trump’s son.”
According to the conference agenda, Eric Trump is set to speak about bitcoin in two half-hour sessions on Friday afternoon.
The SFC told HKFP Yip was unable to attend due to a business trip. HKFP has also reached out to Ng and Bitcoin Asia for comment.
This is the second Bitcoin Asia conference in Hong Kong, organisers said. Last year’s event, held at the Kai Tak Cruise Terminal, attracted around 5,500 attendees.
The Bitcoin Asia event is organised by Bitcoin Magazine, a cryptocurrency publication that has hosted annual bitcoin conferences in the US since 2019.
