Hong Kong activist investor David Webb dies of cancer

HONG Kong activist investor and prominent commentator David Webb has died of metastatic prostate cancer, according to his social media accounts.

Webb, a British-born former investment banker, began publishing columns on economic and corporate governance, finance, regulatory and political issues in Hong Kong on his website in 1998, becoming one of the territory’s most closely followed analysts.

In 2020, Webb said he was stepping back from commentating after being diagnosed with prostate cancer.

“David will be missed by family, many friends, and supporters,” a posting on his X account said on Tuesday.

Webb, 60, was non-executive director of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for five years from 2003.

“David was a principled and passionate believer in the long-term sustainability and integrity of Hong Kong’s markets,” HKEX Chairman Carlson Tong said in a statement on Tuesday.

“We are grateful for his service to HKEX, for his important contributions to the development of Hong Kong’s markets, and for the conviction he brought to his work throughout his career,” Tong said. 

Webb spoke on his long-standing investing career and analysis of Hong Kong’s capital markets at the city’s Foreign Correspondents Club (FCC) in May last year.

“I wanted to use the platform to advance corporate governance (and) reforms in Hong Kong,” Webb said, according to an online FCC report.

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“Probably if I stayed in the UK, I might have ended up in politics.

“I will die confident that I did my best and Hong Kong is my home.”

One of his most well-known pieces of commentary was in 2017 when he mapped a complex web of cross-shareholdings between Hong Kong-listed companies in a report entitled “The Enigma Network: 50 stocks not to own.”

A few months later, 40 of the stocks were at the heart of a market crash that erased US$6 billion in market capitalisation from Hong Kong’s junior board.

Webb‘s commentary was widely read by regulators, investors, bankers and lawyers in Hong Kong.

Webb‘s Substack had more than 40,000 subscribers and he posted pieces as recently as December charting the number of prisoners on remand in Hong Kong hitting a record high. In October, he analysed the city’s profit tax system. REUTERS