David Webb, Hong Kong’s most vocal activist investor whose investigations into corporate malfeasance triggered regulatory probes and made him a minor celebrity in the territory, announced that he has prostate cancer.
Scans revealed tumors along the length of his spine after he saw a doctor about pains in his arm, Webb wrote in a blog post on webb-site.com, his eponymous Web site where he has blasted stock exchange and regulatory officials over the years on various market failings.
“Like every battle I’ve fought for corporate and economic governance in HK, I will fight this with full vigour, and hope to beat it for several years as new treatments emerge, staying at least one step ahead,” he wrote on the blog. “I still have a lot to live for, including a beloved, supportive wife and our two wonderful children whom I hope to see graduate and start their adult lives.”
When reached by telephone, Webb confirmed the content of the post, but did not want to comment further.
Arriving in Hong Kong in 1991 with Barclays PLC, Webb began to trade his own money, and later morphed into a full-time investor. He focused on the territory’s small and mid-sized companies where there was little analyst coverage.
A Bloomberg News profile in January last year said he had amassed at least US$170 million.
“Think of me as an expert mechanic, walking around a second-hand car lot in which there are no warranties, and all of them are discounted for the risk of being lemons,” Webb said in a 2018 speech at the University of Hong Kong.
By avoiding most of the lemons most of the time “and getting a substantial discount on good companies, I have been able to outperform.”
His attempts to clean up Hong Kong’s stock market trace back to 1998, when he decided to quit working life at the age of 33 to manage his own money.
Most of his reform efforts since then have revolved around webb-site.com, a forum for his views on regulation, corporate developments and other market news.
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