David Webb, an activist investor who sparred with the rich and powerful of Hong Kong in campaigns for greater financial transparency and regulation, died on Tuesday in a hospital there. He was 60.
The cause was metastatic prostate cancer, his wife, Karen Webb, said.
Mr. Webb, who moved to Hong Kong from his native Britain more than three decades ago, battled with financial regulators in that Asian financial hub on behalf of minority shareholders, took on the tycoons who dominated Hong Kong’s economy, and exposed shady business dealings.
His most enduring creation is a free public online database that meticulously catalogs the city’s companies and their directors. Webb-site, as he named it, has shed light on the inner workings of Hong Kong’s corporate world and has become an invaluable resource for corporate investigators and journalists alike.
Mr. Webb’s biggest exposé on his platform was a report that documented previously unknown connections between a network of 50 companies that he called the “Enigma Network.” The report, published in 2017, caused the companies’ shares to plummet and prompted investigations by government watchdogs into share price manipulation by the companies’ owners that hurt small investors.
David Michael Webb was born in London on Aug. 29, 1965, and adopted as an infant by a couple living in the city of Leicester, in England’s East Midlands. His mother was a dispensing optician and his father an economist.
As a child, David lived with his family in Bangkok for two years before returning to Britain. At age 16, he designed games and wrote books about coding in the early days of personal computing and sold them for profit, investing his royalties in the stock market. After graduating from Exeter College at Oxford University with a mathematics degree in 1983, he worked for three investment banks in London.
Mr. Webb arrived in Hong Kong from London in 1991 six years before the British colonial government handed over control of the city to the People’s Republic of China. He had lived there ever since. By his account, he came to see great potential in the smaller and lesser-known companies listed on the city’s stock exchange and began digging into their financials to uncover gems that others had overlooked.
By the age of 32, he had earned enough to leave his job. He divided his time between managing his own investments and activism.
He launched Webb-site in 1998, the same year Google launched its search engine. Mr. Webb’s database, which retained the plain, text-heavy style of early web pages, is an extensive trove of analytical reports, financial news and company disclosures. In clear and cutting language, he called out bad corporate actors and the flaws in the financial system that allowed them to flourish.
There was a time when Mr. Webb tried to change the system from within. In 2003, he won a seat on the board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange but resigned a few years later, accusing it 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 an interview with The New York Times in May.
While finance was his main focus, Mr. Webb saw Hong Kong’s economic prospects as inseparable from its political system. In 2014, he gave a speech before thousands of protesters who were calling for a more democratic way of electing the city’s leader, saying that a popular mandate would make Hong Kong 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.
In 2019, massive antigovernment protests rocked the city, and Beijing responded with a security crackdown. In the following years, Hong Kong’s government 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.)
He was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer in 2020. Five years later, after being told he had months to live, he announced that he was trying to find someone to operate Webb-site. But by then, maintaining a repository that examines companies and the powerful people behind them carried political and legal risks, and Mr. Webb found no one willing to take it over.
“We may have reached, in Hong Kong, what I would call peak authoritarianism,” Mr. Webb said in May in a rare public talk, at the Foreign Correspondents Club. “Things, I hope, will get a lot better after my time.”
In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, his mother, a sister and a brother.
To preserve his legacy, Mr. Webb provided backup copies of many of his reports to the Internet Archive and in recent months received accolades from all corners of the corporate world. In June, he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for raising standards of corporate and economic governance in Hong Kong.
“I didn’t want to just, at the end of my life, have the epitaph: He made a lot of money,” Mr. Webb said in the interview with The Times. “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.”
Tiffany May is a reporter based in Hong Kong, covering the politics, business and culture of the city and the broader region.
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