Hong Kong - A disgraced Hong Kong politician burned 70,000 US dollars on the advice of a feng shui master who told him it would help him avoid jail for vote-rigging, a news report said Thursday.

Gilbert Leung told a court he was advised by the feng shui master to burn 15 1,000-Hong-Kong-dollar bills worth 129 US dollars each every night for a year if he wanted to stay out of jail - an act that would have cost him more than 700,000 US dollars, the South China Morning Post reported.

To save money, Leung said he burned 100-dollar bills worth 12.90 US dollars each instead, but the nightly rituals failed to prevent him from going to prison when his case came to court.

When Leung challenged feng shui master Tony Chan about the outcome, Chan told Leung it was his fault for not following his advice by burning 1,000-Hong-Kong-dollar bills.

Asked by Chan's barrister Ian Mill, "You had half a million [Hong Kong] dollars to burn at that time, did you Mr Leung?" the former politician replied, "I had more than that."

Leung, who was jailed for vote-rigging in the 1990s, was testifying in an ongoing legal battle between the family of Asia's one-time richest woman, the late Nina Wang, and Chan, who claims she left him her entire multibillion-dollar fortune in a disputed will.

Chan claimed he was the secret lover for 15 years of Wang, head of the Chinachem property empire, but family members claimed he is using a forged will to try to claim her fortune, which was meant for charity.

Feng shui is the traditional belief in organizing one's life according to the harmony of the elements and is widely followed by people in Hong Kong in everything from choosing auspicious wedding dates to arranging household furnishings.(dpa)