David Webb on speaking truth to power and life with terminal cancer
Corporate governance activist and newly awarded MBE David Webb reflects on his decades of advocacy, his cancer diagnosis and the legacy he hopes to leave
I WAS BORN in London in 1965 and adopted by a couple in Leicester as a baby. My dad was an economist and lectured at the University of Leicester, and my mum was a dispensing optician. In 1972, dad got a job with the United Nations and was seconded to Bangkok. His speciality was public utilities, energy and water. I remember flying kites in Lumphini Park and weekends in Pattaya. I went to a school run by American nuns called Ruamrudee International School, which probably helped to inform my atheism at an early age.
David Webb at a farewell fireside chat at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club on May 12. The club was packed for the event with the 59-year-old corporate governance activist, who is battling late-stage prostate cancer. Photo: May Tse
AFTER TWO YEARS we went back to Leicester for a year and then to a village near York called Escrick. Its claim to fame was that the lower extension of the last ice age reached Escrick and was in a field behind us. When we learned about it at school, I went into the field and checked the soil composition, and indeed there was a lot of rubble in one half of the field and not in the other.
I WENT TO state-run schools and had good teachers. I did my O-levels at Fulford School. In 1981, my dad got a job in the private sector, so we moved down south to Woking, where I did my A-levels. I played the clarinet in the jazz band at school. When I was 16, I created and sold my own computer games in the classified ads in computer magazines. Publishers noticed and started writing to me asking if I could write a book or a game. My first book came out just after I finished my A-levels, called Supercharge Your Spectrum, showing people how to write code. In those days, games were distributed on cassette tapes, which you connected to your computer. I wrote a game called Spookyman, which came out in 1982.
I WAS VERY scientifically and mathematically minded. I did double maths, physics, statistics and went to Oxford University. I continued writing computer games through the first half of my degree. After my first year at Oxford, I got another book out, called Advanced Spectrum Machine Language. With the royalties from the games and books, I began getting involved in the stock market. That led me into corporate finance in London and then to Hong Kong in 1991.
David Webb, pictured in 2009, moved to Hong Kong in the 1990s. Photo: SCMP Archives
I’D STARTED WORK in the City in London in 1986 at a small, old merchant bank called Brown, Shipley & Co. After a year, I was poached by Phillips & Drew stockbroking firm and joined them about a month before the 1987 stock market crash. I stayed with them until 1990 and was then poached by Barclays de Zoete Wedd. They sent me to Hong Kong for a few weeks in the summer of 1990 for a project. I stayed in the old Hilton Hotel. I thought the city was amazing – the tax rates were low and there were no taxes on interest, dividends or capital gains. There was a free-market can-do attitude about the place. Then in 1991 I was sent to Hong Kong for a two-year secondment and stayed forever. I stayed with the bank for three years and then the former chairman of BZW (Asia), who had left, reappeared at Wheelock and Company as an in-house adviser for (chairman) Peter Woo. He hired me, so I went to work for a conglomerate in Hong Kong on a contract.
I MET MY WIFE in Hong Kong in 1994 and we got married in 1996. We had kids in 2003 and 2005. They were brought up in Hong Kong and went to the German Swiss International School. One is just finishing a physics degree at Oxford University and the other one has just started at Liverpool University doing computer science.
David Webb arrives at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong for a farewell fireside chat last month. Photo: May Tse
MY CONTRACT WITH Wheelock expired in 1998 and we went our separate ways. The Asian financial crisis had begun in 1997 in Thailand. It rolled into Hong Kong in 1998 and the stock market crashed. By then I’d been investing in small-cap stocks in Hong Kong for a few years and was doing well at that, so I thought it was a good time to go all in.
