PCCW Chairman Not Quite a Stanford Grad
thestandard.com.au
HONG KONG – The image-makers for Pacific Century CyberWorks liked to brag that Chairman Richard Li was a Stanford grad. It turns out, however, that tales of his graduation were slightly exaggerated.
This will cause some uncomfortable deja vu for those with long memories at PCCW partner Telstra. In the nineties, a senior executive suffered an involuntary career adjustment when it was revealed his credentials were not quite carved in stone either.
More recently, another Telstra partner, for Solution 6 chief Chris Tyler, suffered similar memory blackouts, but perhaps his can be medically attributed because what he forgot was the two bags of dope he was caught with years before when he was partying in the nightclub game.
Thursday's International Herald Tribune reported that Li attended the university in the 1980s, but that, according to university employees, he never received a diploma. Local media began to buzz with headlines like "Phantom Degree."
Amid the media barrage, Li acknowledged that he did not graduate. Blaming the misleading impression on clerical errors in his company's promotional material and on its Web site, he stressed that these "mistakes" did not appear in legal documents.
CyberWorks was once Asia's most promising Internet play. It was wildly popular with retail investors in Hong Kong who saw it as the project of the young son of a tycoon – a son who had all the right stuff: money, connections, and a prestigious Silicon Valley degree in computer engineering. Articles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes, Time and the Standard have all made mention of Li's Stanford degree.
Li told reporters in Tokyo that he "was in a rush to go work at an investment bank so I didn't finish my course." He said that all materials distributed to the general public would be corrected immediately, but hurried to say that "all our documents to the stock exchange, legal institutions and listing companies only said I went to school there, but didn't say I graduated from there."
CyberWorks has tumbled along with the other dot-coms, making Li a high-profile target for both violence and ridicule. At the beginning of this year, bombs damaged phone booths owned by his company. Earlier this month, a publishing company sold nearly 20,000 copies of a 97-page comic book that pokes fun at Li.
The revelation has had little impact on the company's stock price. The stock fell 4 percent to a new 52-week low at 46 cents, but mostly on continued selling pressure from the plan of one of its largest shareholders, the U.K.'s Cable & Wireless, to sell a 7.5 percent stake in the company. The broader Hong Kong market also fell 4 percent. |
