David Webb made his fortune in Hong Kong by weeding out the bad companies from the good on the city’s stock exchange. By the age of 32, he had earned enough to leave his job and decided that he would start ruffling some feathers in his adopted home.
In the three decades since, Mr. Webb, who moved to the city from his native Britain, has almost single-handedly taken on the rich and powerful in the financial hub, tirelessly campaigning for greater transparency from the city’s public companies about their ownership and their financial dealings.
The activist investor tussled with tycoons who dominated Hong Kong’s economy, crossed swords with regulators to fight for the rights of minority shareholders, and lifted the curtain on shadowy business transactions.
His biggest expose was publishing a report that documented previously unknown connections between a network of 50 companies that he called the “Enigma Network.” The report caused their shares to tank and prompted investigations by government watchdogs into share price manipulation by the company’s owners that hurt small investors. One former regulator calls him the “conscience” of Hong Kong’s financial markets.
“I could go out and criticize behavior and companies and not feel like I would become unemployable,” Mr. Webb said in an interview at his apartment, where floor-to-ceiling windows offered a sweeping view of the city’s financial district.
But in February, Mr. Webb, now 59, announced that he was facing a battle he could not win. Five years after being diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer, he was told he had only months to live.
He has since been reflecting on his legacy.
“I didn’t want to just, at the end of my life, have the epitaph: he made a lot of money,” he said. “Lots of investors have done that. It’s much better to feel that you’ve accomplished something in the policy areas, made the place you live in a better place.”
Perhaps his most enduring contribution is a free public online database he built to catalog companies and their directors, that has become an invaluable resource for corporate investigators and journalists alike.
Now the future of that website is in doubt. In recent years Hong Kong’s government has moved to restrict public access to some types of information, including obscuring details that can identify directors of companies, while a national security crackdown from China has also narrowed room for criticism of those in authority. Maintaining a repository that maps companies and the powerful people behind them could now carry political and legal risks, and Mr. Webb has not found anyone willing to take it over.
Mr. Webb said he had tried handing over his database to the University of Hong Kong, but the university ultimately turned him down, along with his offers of substantial donations to support the site.
“The relevant faculty heads were all in favor,” Mr. Webb wrote in a post in February. “But in a post-National Security Law environment, the detailed proposal was rejected by the university’s ‘Senior Management Team’.”
A spokesman for the University of Hong Kong did not directly address Mr. Webb’s account of what had happened, saying in an email only that the institution was dedicated to “academic freedom and the freedom of thought and speech.”
Mr. Webb launched his platform, which he called Webb-site, in 1998, by combining coding skills he had picked up as a teenager with his early interest in investing. The site has retained the plain, text-heavy style of early web pages, and is a trove of analytical reports, financial news and company disclosures illuminating the connections within Hong Kong’s corporate world.
He had arrived in Hong Kong from London in 1991 to work for an investment bank. He saw great potential in the city’s smaller, lesser-known companies, and began digging into their financials to uncover gems that others had overlooked.
By 1998, he was doing so well he wanted to devote his attention to managing his own investments — and on calling out bad corporate actors and the flaws in the financial system that allowed them to flourish.
He tried, for a time, to change the system from within. In 2003, he won a seat on the board of the Hong Kong exchange, seeking to “improve the way the rules worked,” he recalled.
Christine Loh, a former lawmaker and government minister, said that she later agreed to join Mr. Webb on the board after he told her he felt like “a very lonely voice.”
“We put a little bit of fire under the feet of the board,” she said.
But Mr. Webb resigned a few years later, accusing the exchange in a fiery resignation letter of withholding information from the board and bowing to political concerns. He realized that he would “be better off on the outside rocking the boat,” he said in the interview.
Mr. Webb “fought tirelessly for the rights of ordinary investors in companies controlled by powerful interests who disliked the idea of being held to account by public shareholders,” said Ashley Alder, the former chief executive officer of the city’s Securities and Futures Commission.
Mr. Alder described Mr. Webb, who had served on a committee in the commission for 24 years, as the “conscience” of the city’s financial markets.
Richard Winter, an investment banker who has known Mr. Webb for decades, said that while many in the business world shared his concerns about corporate malpractice, some disagreed with his calls for more regulation.
“There are different views on the correct balance between intrusive rules and regulations, which can suffocate our markets, and a lighter touch using the rifle rather than machine gun to police our markets,” Mr. Winter said.
Finance was Mr. Webb’s main interest, but he saw the city’s economic prospects as inseparable from its political system. In 2014, he gave a speech to thousands of protesters, calling for a more democratic way of electing its leader, saying a popular mandate would make the city more stable and prosperous.
“Don’t worry about the small economic impact of these protests,” he said, according to a transcript of the speech on his website. “Think about the large economic benefits of a more dynamic economy, ending collusion between the government and the tycoons who currently elect” the city’s leader, he said.
He also criticized China’s increasing encroachment on the city’s governance.
“When 70 old tycoons visit Beijing for instructions, you just know something is wrong,” he said in that speech.
In 2019, massive antigovernment protests rocked the city, and Beijing responded with the security crackdown. In the years that followed, Hong Kong’s government also limited the public’s access to corporate information, arguing that company directors’ identifying details should be obscured to address concerns about privacy. Mr. Webb had lobbied against the move, succeeding for a time, but the rules were ultimately changed.
“We may have reached, in Hong Kong, what I would call peak authoritarianism,” Mr. Webb said in May, during a rare public talk billed as his farewell address at the Foreign Correspondents Club. “Things, I hope, will get a lot better after my time.”
He has decided to wind down his website and has backed up many of his reports to the Internet Archive.
Ms. Loh, his friend, described him as a “hero of the time.”
Mr. Webb said he hoped that more people in his position would choose to speak out as he did.
“Now I am at the end of my life and I’m looking back and no regrets,” he said.
Tiffany May is a reporter based in Hong Kong, covering the politics, business and culture of the city and the broader region.
The post An Investor Who Took on Hong Kong’s Tycoons Faces a Tougher Foe appeared first on New York Times.
