Thank you, David Webb, you made Hong Kong a better place

Like many long-time reporters in Hong Kong, I had occasional dealings with David Webb, the market transparency and shareholder rights crusader who died this week of prostate cancer at the relatively young age of 60. Almost all of my encounters with him over the years were annoying and slightly unpleasant. But they made me respect him all the more.He once chastised me for misstating a relatively obscure Nasa space mission in the 1960s and demanded a print correction. I thought, who cares? But I was impressed he knew about it off the top of his head. That was long before Google was a thing.When you found yourself with him in a gathering of people, you somehow knew he thought he was the smartest and most knowledgeable guy in the room. Usually, he was. The fact that he was a Briton and most of the others were often local Chinese like me made him all the more offensive.But unless rumours of him being a foreign spy were true, and there had never been real evidence for them, Webb was incorruptible with a generous public spirit to serve the investment community.He also made himself a very rich man through sheer skill and intelligence, and some luck. Bloomberg once estimated him to be worth US$170 million, a fortune amassed over decades by investing in undervalued small to mid-sized local firms. That required a lot of research. Here was an investor with his own convictions and no use for crowd-following or momentum investing to make or lose money.More importantly, he turned his research into detective work to expose corporate malfeasance, irresponsible company boards, stupid bureaucrats and counterproductive rules and regulations.David Webb raises questions at a PCCW annual general meeting in Quarry Bay, on May 19, 2004. Photo: May Tse