My story with Victor Fraile

Below is a factual summary of my experience working with Power Sport Images and Victor Fraile.

I worked for Power Sport Images as a photo editor from 2016 to 2017. Victor Fraile approached me after my move to Hong Kong and I thought getting a fixed salary was a good idea as I hadn’t had time to develop a network of clients for my freelance photography yet.

My salaries were usually paid with a couple of days of delay, which was annoying but I came to accept. The first thing I really didn’t like was when Victor Fraile denied me 2 days of holidays before the end of 2016 because his calculations of my days off were not the same as mine. I took 2 days of medical leave instead.

In 2017, relations deteriorated on the subject of clients I brought to Victor’s company. Knowing that I could bring some new clients, but being fully-employed at Victor Fraile’s company, I wouldn’t have the time to do their assignments outside of my work time, I had negotiated this case in my work contrat. I was to receive 30% of the income generated from clients I would bring to the company on top of my fixed salary. I often photographed the assignments of these new clients myself during my work time, so in essence I was giving 70% of income I generated to the company in exchange for shooting during my work hours. This highly profitable agreement for Victor Fraile was still not enough for him, because he started to pay my 30% commissions extremely late (months after receiving the money from clients) and recalculated the 30% after deducting fees such as a percentage of the company’s rent, domain name’s annual price, and daily salary of a staff photographer if I wasn’t the one doing the job. Since I had envisioned these problems ahead of time, I had actually detailed in my employment contract what could and couldn’t be deducted of the 30% – rent, domain name, and staff photographer’s salary were non-deductible. When I showed him this on the contract signed by both of us, he acted surprised. He followed this by blocking all payments of my 30% commissions from then on.

I decided to act on 3 fronts. First, I contacted the Labour Relations Department in Hong Kong, which is the appropriate department for work disputes before an employment contract is broken. Victor Fraile didn’t react to this and didn’t go to mediation appointments mandated by the Labour Relations Dept.

Second, I contacted Victor Fraile’s business partner Raf Sanchez and reported the problem about my 30% commissions to him. Raf Sanchez had left Hong Kong before I was hired by Power Sports Images, but had been a founder of the company and was still an operating Director of the company, with legal responsibility. For personal reasons, Raf Sanchez was not employed as a lawyer by another company in London. Raf Sanchez turned a comprehensive ear to my claims and recalculated some of my commissions, finding results very close to my calculations (with HKD5 difference), and far from Victor Fraile’s calculations (which deprived me of thousands of HK dollars). He even made Victor Fraile pay me some late commissions, but the problem was that the paid commissions were only 5-10, while the remaining commissions to pay were 20-30. Raf Sanchez argued that he didn’t have enough time to recalculate all, but declined to just approve my calculations, which would be the fastest solution. I explained to him that until I was paid all the money that was due to me, I was going to continue with my process with the Labour Relations Department, and will not withdraw my case. Raf Sanchez said he was disappointed by this.

Now the third thing I did and that I came to regret later was that I noticed that Victor Fraile’s company was using 4 trade names with logos (“Power Sport Images”, “Creative Circle Visuals”, “Koncepte Films”, and “Studio East”) but never actually registered officially the trademarks in question. Given Raf Sanchez’s legal background, this oversight was very surprising. I decided to registered these trademarks under my name, and paid the levies in the trademark bureau. My idea was to have leverage to get my money back on the 30% commissions, effectively offering to give ownership of the trademarks that I had purchased in exchange for the money that I was due.

Victor Fraile fired me in June 2017, effective immediately. Victor Fraile decided he wasn’t going to pay me my last month’s salary, nor the 30% commissions due, nor the 1 month notice salary that is due to all employees according to the law of Hong Kong. I went to the Labour Tribunal and sued him.

Victor Fraile reacted to this by complete indifference, not showing up when summoned by the Labour Tribunal, and this resulted in the Labour Tribunal deciding the case in my favour in the summer of 2016. This is where I made a mistake: I actually told Raf Sanchez about the decision of the Labour Tribunal by sending him a Whatapp message. I thought the decision was final, but I was wrong. Raf Sanchez then sprang into action and argued that the company had not received any notice from the tribunal (not true) and that they needed time to defend themselves. The tribunal agreed to this and this WhatsApp message cost me 8 extra month of legal procedure.

At the next hearing at the Labour Tribunal, Victor Fraile actually showed up and defended his point of view. The tribunal’s main concern was to try to get us in a room with a mediator and find an amount of compensation that we both could agree on. Since I hadn’t added anything to the money that was due to me (my last 2 salaries and 30% commissions) I refused to back down from this sum that was legally owed to me, while Victor Fraile was offering extremely low amounts. We didn’t find an agreement that day. This was the last time that Victor Fraile participated in the course of law, and after this hearing, he packed his things and left Hong Kong, bankrupting his company, and he has never returned since.

Raf Sanchez was left to defend the case in front of the Labour Tribunal from a distance, and successfully delayed the procedure several times, arguing that they were going to sue me in front of of a higher court for trademark infringement. Since the High Court is indeed above the Labour Tribunal, the Labour Tribunal had to agree to several postponements so that the High Court could take first a resolution on the trademark issue. Only problem was that Raf Sanchez never filed any lawsuit in front of the High Court. After waiting several months, the Labour Tribunal was not very happy to have been taken for a fool, and summoned Power Sports Images to another hearing, no postponement accepted.

During the postponements, I decided to escalate things legally myself. I disclosed to the appropriate government bodies that Power Sports Images (PSI) cheated on their taxes, and their MPF payments (the MPF is Hong Kong’s Mandatory Pensions system). The tax department of Hong Kong acted swiftly and within 3 months got Power Sports Images convicted by an ad hoc tribunal, despite Power Sport Images having hired a team of local attorneys. Due to the Tax department’s specific way of working, the final fine PSI had to pay is not public knowledge. The MPF trial was resolved in the same quick way, after I disclosed to the MPF Authority that PSI never made any payment to my pension’s fund, despite their legal requirements. The team of legal attorneys hired by PSI could do nothing, and PSI was sentenced to pay HKD42,000. After the judgement I had the happy surprise to find that my pensions’ fund had been credited with the sums that PSI should have paid in the first place. What PSI had to pay the team of attorneys is a mystery.

A specificity of Hong Kong is that defaulting on the salaries of your employees is not only a civil matter, but also a criminal offence. The Labour Department took action and started a criminal lawsuit against the two directors of the company, namely Raf Sanchez and Victor Fraile. This was done in the name of the people of Hong Kong and I was only called as a witness. The Court summoned Raf Sanchez, who flew in from London, and was found guilty and sentenced a HKD6,000 fine and a permanent criminal record. The tribunal’s leniency must have come from the fact that Raf Sanchez actually showed up, and from my own testimony which stated that he wasn’t the main person responsible. Despite legal summons from the Criminal Tribunal of Hong Kong, Victor Fraile didn’t show up, and to this day cannot set foot in Hong Kong without being immediately arrested by the police and brought in front of the Court. I hope it happens.

The Labour Tribunal’s procedure finally restarted in spring 2017 and when he saw that he couldn’t postpone it any longer, Raf Sanchez contacted me and offered to settle. I accepted his offer for lump sum of HKD200,000, rounded up from the salaries + commissions’ due to me, in order to account for the lost time and the amount of legal work I had to do. To Raf Sanchez’s surprise, I didn’t ask for any extra money for the trademarks that I registered except the levies it cost me to register them, and just gave the trademarks to him on the agreement that I will keep the “Studio East” trademark for myself. To this day, I use “Studio East” as the name of my website. When he realised that I wouldn’t ask for money, Raf Sanchez couldn’t make me sign the papers fast enough.

After this adventure, the word got out and freelance photographers and make up artists contacted me to tell me that they too were owned money by Victor Fraile, and could I help them? Some of these people had turned me down when I asked for their testimonies during my lawsuits. Nevertheless, I helped them as much as I could with my newly acquired legal knowledge. Since none of them were actually employed by PSI, I advised them that the Labour Tribunal was not the way to go, but that they should turn to the Small Claims Tribunal instead. As Victor Fraile is not in Hong Kong anymore, none of these people received their money back, even after a decision in their favour from the Labour Tribunal. I know understand that the only reason Victor Fraile was able to offer very low rates to his clients was because he was cheating everybody, the tax department, the MPF, and freelancers out of their money. Without stealing photographers’ money, his company would crumble to the ground.

I have since started the website http://www.victorfrailevictims.com, to warn off people to not work with Victor Fraile, as he still operates in Europe and the Middle East. I have recently enlarged the website to warn people about other crooks in our industry and for this reason renamed it http://www.photographypapers.com.

Lucas Schifres, February 4^th, 2026