Hong Kong’s Best Known Activist Investor to Shutter Influential Website
(Bloomberg) — David Webb, Hong Kong’s most famous activist investor, is seizing the time on the website he founded in 1998 that is key to decades of efforts to provide greater transparency in the city’s financial markets.
Webb wrote in an online blog post Monday for Webb-site.com that the dedicated server will shut down at the end of October 31 when the contract expires, which also means public access to the database will end. The 60-year-old British man, who had prostate cancer, said that the most important reason for not renewing the contract was his deterioration in health.
Webb has been a vocal critic and beneficiary of Hong Kong’s business environment for much of his time living in the city, and has long campaigned for freer markets. He previously estimated his annual gain on the stock market at 20% between 1995 and 2019, attributing his success to the city’s weak corporate governance and lax regulatory oversight.
Over decades, Webb built a database to keep track of everything from Hong Kong’s corporate records to the city’s legal and advisory bodies.
Webb said he will continue to upload weekly dumps of the database to a repository on Google Drive as long as possible, adding that he hopes “individuals and organizations working in the public interest” will use the database and release their own versions in due course.
“In the meantime,” he said, “perhaps some people and companies will be glad to see the light of their questionable pasts go out!”
Webb came to Hong Kong in 1991 with Barclays Plc before leaving working life to manage his own money. His activist accomplishments include uncovering the case in 2017 of a group of 50 firms he called The Enigma Network that he said had common owners and whose share prices were artificially inflated. Many of the network’s shares crashed soon after its investigation became public, triggering the city’s financial regulator’s biggest investigation to date.
In May, Webb bid farewell to the city, talking about his life and views in an hour-long conversation with veteran journalist Philip Bowring in front of a packed crowd at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.
Despite the website being shut down, Webb said in Monday’s post that he would open a site on Substack: “To voice my opinions on important issues from time to time until I’m too weak to do so – I just can’t stop myself.”
“However, if this will be my last public statement, then let me say this: After my beloved family, running Webb-site.com and campaigning for the public good in corporate and economic management since 1998 has been the joy of my life,” he said.
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