To be quite honest I hadn’t really been listening to what Tony was saying. The restaurant commanded one of the best views in Hong Kong and it seemed a pity to waste it on some turgid discussion of corporate governance or the like. Victoria Harbour was, as Tony himself might have put it in his City days, looking quite splendid.
Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on which way you looked at it – Tony couldn’t see the view. He was looking the other way and intent on sharing his stories of the perils of fund management. Nor was he aware that I’d spent a good deal of the last half hour casually lining up blemishes on the window pane with innocent-looking boats as they chugged their way across the bay. Kerboom! I imagined the spray glistening in the sunlight once my sights had locked in on their target. It passed the time rather nicely.
The skill didn’t just lie in refined shooting with my cunningly concealed bazooka. Closing one eye and making a slight movement of the head could be fairly easily hidden from Tony as he droned on. No, the real subterfuge lay in pretending I was still interested in the conversation. One side of my brain was heavily involved in a rapidly escalating war situation; the other side was calmly sipping coffee, nodding earnestly (in the right places) and dealing with tedious chit-chat about minority shareholders. Oh, the excessive pressures placed upon some of us as we wend our way through our daily lives.
‘…I think the only way out of it might be some kind of activist campaign through the media,’ Tony said. ‘You know, force their hand. That kind of thing.’ Ding! Warning bells rang in my control room. Back to reality, please. Here’s something that might be of interest. Best to be honest – it would save time.
‘I’m very sorry, Tony, I drifted off then. What’s the problem exactly?’ Tony sighed, resigned to his fate of repeating the whole story.
‘Well, it’s this continuing issue of original owners. You know, the founding families. They think they continue to have a divine right to do what they want once they’ve taken the company public. They want the money, but they don’t want any of the corresponding responsibilities of telling us what’s going on with the company. It really bugs me.’
‘But surely you don’t care as long as the performance is okay?’ I suggested.
‘That’s the attitude we used to take,’ snorted Tony, adopting a war-torn look of his own. ‘Before the Asian crisis hit we were all happy enough just being in on a lot of these stocks for the ride. Now we’re a lot more careful. A complete lack of information from a company – even just the basics would be nice – means that alarm bells begin to sound.’
‘So why don’t you just sell out of those stocks?’
‘Because there are far too many of them! We’re meant to be tracking the Hong Kong market for a lot of our clients. Pulling out of all those stocks which we viewed as a bit of an information risk would effectively mean pulling out of Hong Kong. And we don’t want to do that. Many of these are potentially great investments; I’d just feel a little bit happier if I was privy to some of what was actually going on.’
‘So do you think a high level media campaign would work? It’s not really your style. Wouldn’t it just offend too many people?’
‘Oh, it would certainly offend people,’ chuckled Tony. ‘It would shock a few people in my organization too. But I’ve really come to the end of my tether. If we don’t cover ourselves from a risk point of view, then I get it in the neck. To do that I need information from the companies, for that read information from the founding families. Equally, if we don’t cover ourselves from a performance point of view, I also get it in the neck. I need information for that too. I think that a little nudge in the right direction from the media might be what I’m looking for – even though that may lead to even more trouble.’
‘Sounds like you can’t win whichever way you turn,’ I ventured. ‘That’s a classic family situation. Maybe now you can see where they’re coming from?’
