Business Daily meets: activist investor David Webb
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Hello, I'm Martin Yip, and welcome to Business Daily Meets on the BBC World Service, where we bring you in-depth interviews with people in business from across the globe.

Today we are going to Hong Kong to speak to activist investor David Webb. Hong Kong will never be dead. I hope it will retain its separate existence and there will be better times ahead because there's no alternative economically. A great disappointment to me that I won't be around to see how it all plays out. After decades of defending the rights of retail investors, David was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2020.

Now, his story takes on a more personal dimension. If you're diagnosed with a fatal disease at 54, suddenly your life expectancy has been reduced from about 30 years to just a few years. It's like your clock is running six times faster than you expected. You reprioritise. We look back at David Webb's life and what his story tells us about the future of Hong Kong, all coming up in today's Business Daily.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. If I could have your attention, please. My name is Lee Williamson. I am the president of the Foreign Correspondents Club Hong Kong. Welcome to the FCC, and thank you for joining us this afternoon to say thank you and sadly farewell to investor and activist David Webb. I ask each and every person to please take to your feet and join me in welcoming Philip Bowering and David Webb.

He's Hong Kong's most prominent activist investor, famous for championing transparency and his investigations into corporate wrongdoing, an inspiration to many. But who exactly is David Webb? I'm the founder of web-site.com.

which I established in 1998, the year that Google was founded, but they're a bit bigger. And I set up the site after a career in investment banking to advocate for reforms to corporate and economic governance in Hong Kong and the region. Born in London in 1965 to a single mother, he is now estimated to be worth $170 million.

David moved to Hong Kong in 1991 as a young investment banker, and that's where his career really took off. I was working for a bank in London, and they had an opening here in their start-up corporate finance department.

And they asked me to come out for a two-year secondment to fill that and offered me a promotion that I wouldn't get if I stayed in London because I was too young. I was the youngest assistant director they ever had and later the youngest director globally in the corporate finance division in Hong Kong. And I had been sent out for a very short assignment, 10 days in 1990, so I'd already had a taste of the place.

And the office here had a taste of me and I was single and easy to relocate. So I jumped, you know, although I was initially concerned about how do I get back to London after two years? I love the place and never left and became a permanent resident after the seven year residency requirement in 1998.

which meant that I couldn't be deported for anything I said. It was a free place at that time anyway. So what you loved most then? The first impression was one that, although a few things had changed, was basically the same as Milton Friedman's famous series that he filmed in Hong Kong.

Ships from all nations come here to trade because there are no duties, no tariffs on imports or exports. He basically held out Hong Kong as a laissez-faire successful capitalist economy that had allowed its people to prosper through their own hard work out of circumstances that were surrounding Hong Kong. Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated places on earth.

Since arriving here aged 26, David made his name and his fortune by spotting winning trades in the city's notoriously volatile small and mid-cap market.

motivated by a belief that minority investors deserve a fair shot, he became a focal critic of monopolies and tycoon-dominated industries, even earning a seat on the board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. I was a director of that from 2003 to 2008, elected by the shareholders. One of the six out of 13 that can be elected by the shareholders. It's still a government-controlled entity. The other seven are appointed by the government.

But I did lobby for them not to be so dependent on the mainland for business because in any business you try to diversify your customer base.

And so Hong Kong could have been a stronger and still could a stronger regional capital raising forum. And, you know, that would make it less dependent on mainland China for business. But at the current stage, yes, about 80 percent of the market value of Hong Kong can be classified broadly as mainland companies.

Hong Kong is often held as one of the world's freest economies, with low taxes, open markets and minimal government interference. But is it really as free as it seems? Because of economic policy, it is not as free as it once was. The government has adopted a mainland-style central planning approach, spending hundreds of billions of Hong Kong dollars, that's tens of US billions, on the economy.

on government-directed infrastructure, particularly creating areas called technology hubs up near the border with China. They've already done that before with a cyber port on Hong Kong Island and a science park in the new territories of Hong Kong. And that money has to come from somewhere. It comes out of taxpayers' pockets in the end. It's money that they could have used

for their entrepreneurial choices and the public and the market is generally better at allocating capital than the government is. The government has been trying to fit in with the mainland's five-year planning system and at the same time they're saying if we build all this infrastructure, technology parks,

just next to the border and inhale deeply, then the technology will fill our veins and somehow flow through this border. But the problem is that we do have two different legal systems. No capital controls here, but capital controls there. Immigration controls for the movement of people to and from Hong Kong to the mainland and customs duties.

And so those things have to stay in place as long as Hong Kong has its own legal system and own taxation system and so on, even technically its own currency.

the Hong Kong dollar. So there are limits to what you can achieve. Our labour costs are generally higher. Our land is certainly scarcer. And it's a gross misallocation of capital. We don't need to raise revenues. We need to cut expenditure. David has become Hong Kong's most vocal activist investor, with one cause at the heart of his work for years, protecting investors' rights. Investors are not treated fairly in Hong Kong.

Most listed companies have a controlling shareholder and there's a requirement that each board should have one third of its directors classified as independent non-executive directors and there should be at least three of them. So it's not a surprise that the typical board has exactly nine directors so that they only have to employ three independent directors. But they're not independent because they're nominated by the controlling shareholders of the company.

through the nominating committee. You're listening to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.

I'm Zing Singh. And I'm Simon Jack. And together we host Good Bad Billionaire. The podcast exploring the lives of some of the world's richest people. In the new season, we're setting our sights on some big names. Yep, LeBron James and Martha Stewart, to name just a few. And as always, Simon and I are trying to decide whether we think they're good, bad or just another billionaire. That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

I'm Martin Yip, and today I'm speaking to David Webb, Hong Kong's most prominent activist investor and the founder of web-site.com, a free online platform that offers stock market news and data while advocating for better corporate and economic governance.

David is well known for attending protests and speaking out against the Hong Kong government's policies. Over the past decade, he's joined hundreds of thousands in the pro-democracy movement, including the 2014 demonstrations, famously known as Occupy Central or the Umbrella protests. They call their movement Occupy Central with Love and Peace.

This is Hong Kong Central, but there wasn't much love or peace. Riot police on the front line, but behind the smoke, an angry Beijing. The so-called Occupy Central protests on the roads near the government offices, they ended. I actually spoke, I wrote a piece called The Admiralty Address.

I spoke to them and urged the students to, apart from the peaceful protests, to get back to the universities because they are the future of Hong Kong. They're the smart ones who would one day be running Hong Kong. I encouraged them to protest by night and study by day. They mustn't forget that they are students benefiting from a very heavily subsidised education and they are potentially the future leaders of Hong Kong, and they still are, even from then. They could still, in a more democratic Hong Kong, they could come forwards.

Whilst many are thrilled to see so many young people on the streets carrying the protest, they're also quietly terrified. One source who knows Hong Kong well says he fears for these protests in the hands of zealous 17-year-olds. They've seen what happens when China gets angry. They don't want to see it happen here.

So, what kind of a future might these students see in Hong Kong? In 1997, Hong Kong was handed back to China in a peaceful ceremony after 156 years. Welcome to viewers around the world from Hong Kong on this, its last day of rule by Britain. It's already four o'clock in the afternoon here, and how you view today's ceremonies depends on how you describe today's events.

For Britain, it's a handover of power in a territory that it has held for 156 years. For China, it's the return of power over a territory that it was forced to hand over under duress and has resented ever since. China agreed to govern Hong Kong under the principle of one country, two systems, where the city would enjoy a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign and defence affairs, for the next 50 years.

But come 2047, that agreement expires and mainland China is no longer bound to uphold it. Which raises the question, what does the future hold for Hong Kong? Hong Kong will never be dead. I hope it will retain its separate existence and its legal system after 2047. And there will be better times ahead for

Because there's no alternative economically to eventually opening up the country. And then Hong Kong will, of course, participate in that relaxation of authoritarian controls and we will move down the democratic development path. It's a great disappointment to me that I won't be around to see how it all plays out. In many fields of life that I follow, I'm fascinated by...

cosmology and whether we will discover proof that there has at some point been intelligent life elsewhere. I'm fascinated by whether artificial general intelligence will become a super intelligence smarter than all of humanity put together. We're a very fragile species, you know, computers will never get cancer or any other disease. They will just keep working the way they're designed and if they have robotic extensions they'll be able to replace their failing parts.

And maybe we'll get to that stage biologically as well and we can live much longer lives. David won't be here to see how the tour unfolds, but his influence has been undeniable. For a one-man operation, his impact has reached far and wide. Beyond managing his fast-growing portfolio, he championed corporate governance reforms and didn't hesitate to call out public companies he believed were in the wrong.

The most famous example? A group of 50 firms he dubbed the Enigma Network. With all he's achieved, what is he most proud of? I don't like to prioritise them or to rank their effectiveness. But I would just point to a couple of things. One was changing the way that companies count their votes to make it a one-share, one-vote basis. Because we inherited a system which said, let's just have a show of hands.

from Victorian England. So I changed that system by using a loophole in the Victorian company law that said if five members of the company demanded a one share, one vote poll, that's called a poll voting, then it would happen and we would count all the external proxies that had been submitted. And I turned up at all the big companies here

in 2003, right in the middle of SARS in the spring of 2003, they were doing that, and demanded poll voting for all of their meetings. And six years after that, it became mandatory in the listing rules because I was going to keep the pressure on the big companies who indirectly control the listing committee here so that there would be no pushback. That was one of my stronger contributions to the system, and it was

eventually reflected into Hong Kong company law. But what's it like to see the impact of his work, not just in the markets, but in the lives of people who've been following his career? It's been very heartwarming to know that so many people, not just in Hong Kong, but Asia and around the world, have appreciated the work I've done. I've had, you know, thousands of comments on the Facebook page and emails to my website saying so.

and some of them I share with my family because they're so touching. And it's something for them as well to remember me by. So, you know, I'm glad that I did all the work I did for the public good. I hope it was for the public good. Others can judge that. And it's much better than dying a rich man without having made any contribution. You know, I think anyone in my fortunate circumstance of not needing employment...

having the financial security to say what they think and having the skill set and intelligence to do it should do that. You know, they should speak out and work on public projects. It's been five years since David was diagnosed with cancer and he doesn't know how much time he has left.

So now feels like a meaningful moment to look back and hear his story in his own words. If you get it in your 80s or even 90s, that's a very different situation. But if you're diagnosed with a fatal disease at 54, suddenly your life expectancy has been reduced from about 30 years to just a few years. It's like your clock is running six times faster than you expected. You reprioritise.

I mean, the bucket list is far too long to finish, unfortunately, and now I can't really travel with my treatment. But there are other things on one's bucket list, like seeing your children move on through their lives. The eldest son will be graduating soon in Oxford this summer, and I'm hoping to be well enough to travel to see it. Otherwise, I'll watch from here if I'm alive. And

I'd like to get to 60 this August 29th. There's no point in worrying. It doesn't help. Obviously, I wish my life was longer, but the way I handled my life, I have this slogan, very popular slogan, carpe diem, seize the day. And in Cantonese, there's another phrase, ga yao, add oil. It means go for it. And that was the approach I took through the activism so that however long or short my life would be,

I'd be able to look back and say, I made a contribution to my community. I didn't just make money. Despite just 60 years, this life you lived with no regrets. No regrets. And I hope that others will regard it as a life well lived. I wish I had an extra 30 years, but we all die sometime.

That's David Webb, activist investor and founder of web-site.com. He spoke to me, Martin Yip, for this edition of Business Daily. To get in touch with the team, send us an email. The address is businessdaily at bbc.co.uk. Thank you.

I'm Zing Singh. And I'm Simon Jack. And together we host Good Bad Billionaire. The podcast exploring the lives of some of the world's richest people. In the new season, we're setting our sights on some big names. Yep, LeBron James and Martha Stewart, to name just a few. And as always, Simon and I are trying to decide whether we think they're good, bad or just another billionaire. That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.