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Ben Kwok

No cheers as Grandtop boss scores Premier League goal
Carson Yeung Ka-sing (below) might be the first Chinese to own an English Premier League football team, but it doesn't seem to have impressed many of his sporting colleagues back home.
We gather that the Grandtop International Holdings chairman, who has spent HK$925 million buying Birmingham City Football Club, feels he deserves more respect for raising Hong Kong's profile in the world of sport. 
It has got to the stage where he has been so miffed that he walked away from sponsoring a local sporting event.
His people explained Yeung was very disappointed none from the local sports arena had written to congratulate him on his purchase.
The apathy could have something to do with his brief history with the city's first division football scene. 
He was the chairman and main financier of Hong Kong Rangers Football Club from 2005 to early 2007 but later lost interest. Rangers were demoted to the second division in 2007 and later merged to become Fourway Rangers. 
Short-lived euphoria
The market excitement over i-Cable Communications winning the English Premier League broadcasting rights didn't last very long.
Shares in the Wharf (Holdings) cable unit  slid  5.8 per cent yesterday to HK$1.13 after a strong rally had sent them to a year-high  HK$1.48 at one stage on Tuesday following the announcement that the company had regained the rights to the hugely popular football league.
Worries that the cable-television operator had overpaid in clinching the deal cooled investor interest as reports suggested i-Cable might have to draw on its parent for financing - two newspapers suggested that the winning bid even caught i-Cable management by surprise.
We heard that i-Cable paid about HK$1.4 billion for the three-year rights, the same as what SingTel paid earlier this month. But the price tag was still more than 60 per cent of i-Cable's market capitalisation, which stood at HK$2.27 billion yesterday.
Our i-Cable contact declined to comment on the numbers that had been bandied about but strongly hinted that it was a very conservative company. 
Shares in PCCW, whose Now TV will lose the rights to broadcast the English Premier League next season, rebounded one cent yesterday to HK$1.93.
Costly systems upgrade
It doesn't take an accountant to work out that there is no real winner when a company loses its chief financial officer.
The curious case of China Metal Recycling (Holdings) has cost its chairman Chun Chi-wai more than a billion dollars and former finance chief Wong Hok-leung a few million.
Shares in the company, which listed only five months ago, plummeted as much as 45 per cent on Tuesday following the announcement of Wong's resignation. Yesterday, they gained just 0.82 per cent to close at HK$8.64,  still 10 per cent below the price at which Chun had entered the market on Tuesday to try to steady the ship.
Chun paid HK$10.56 million to acquire his firm's shares at HK$9.70 on Tuesday morning, which meant he immediately suffered a paper loss of HK$1.15 million on top of the paper loss of HK$1.05 billion on the shares he already owned. 
Arguably, Chun saved some money from losing his chief financial officer, who made HK$3.75 million a year and had 6.55 million share options at the initial public offering price of HK$5.18, which we doubt he will be able to exercise.
One of the reasons the relationship between two men turned sour was a dispute over financial records. Wong claimed his access to certain financial information had been denied, but the firm countered that Wong's access was only denied for a day because of a systems upgrade.
It must go down as one of the most expensive upgrades of all time.
Welcome to Hamsterville
The very latest thing in the hospitality industry comes from a hotel in the French city of Nantes that is offering people the chance to live like a hamster. 
For Euro99 (HK$1,144) a night, visitors can feast on hamster grain, get a workout by running in a giant wheel and sleep in haystacks in  a suite called the 'Hamster Villa'. 
It's the latest venture from a couple of guys who run a company  that rents out unusual venues to adventure-seekers. 
We know of hotels in Tsim Sha Tsui that let people live like animals for considerably less than Euro99 a night.



Lai See