(Bloomberg) — Hong Kong’s most famous activist investor David Webb is calling time on his website, which he founded in 1998 and was key to his decades-long efforts to push for greater transparency in the city’s financial markets.
The dedicated server for Webb-site.com will shut down at the end of Oct. 31 when the contract expires, meaning public access to the database will terminate at the same time, Webb wrote in an online blog post Monday. The 60-year old Briton, who has prostate cancer, said his declining health was a major reason for not renewing the contract.
Webb has been a vociferous critic — and beneficiary — of Hong Kong’s business environment for much of the time he has lived in the city and has long campaigned for freer markets. He previously estimated his annualized gains in the stock market between 1995 and 2019 at 20%, attributing his success to the city’s weak corporate governance and lax regulatory oversight.
Over the decades, Webb built up the database to track everything from Hong Kong’s corporate filings to the city’s statutory and advisory bodies.
Webb said he will continue to upload weekly dumps of the database on a repository on Google Drive for as long as he was able, adding he hopes “public-spirited individuals and organizations” will use the database and in due course publish their own versions.
“In the meantime,” he said, “perhaps some individuals and companies will be delighted that the lights have gone out on their somewhat dubious pasts!”
Webb came out to Hong Kong in 1991 with Barclays Plc before quitting working life to manage his own money. His activist successes include uncovering in 2017 the case of a group of 50 firms he named The Enigma Network, which he said had common owners and artificially inflated share prices. The shares of many of the network collapsed soon after his research was made public, triggering the largest ever investigation by the city’s financial regulator.
In May, Webb bid a public farewell to the city by speaking about his life and his views in an hour-long conversation with veteran journalist Philip Bowring in front of a packed crowd at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.
Despite the closure of his website, Webb said in his Monday post he will open a site on Substack “to occasionally ventilate my views on important issues until I am too weak to do so — I just can’t stop myself.”
“However, if this should be my last public utterance, then let me just utter that after my loving family, running Webb-site.com and campaigning for the public interest in corporate and economic governance since 1998 has been the joy of my life,” he said.
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