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Technology Stocks : Pacific Century CyberWorks (PCW, PCWKF) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (630)	3/9/2000 5:48:00 AM
From: ms.smartest.person	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4541

Li Ka-Shing Land - As Hong Kongûs Li family empire gets even bigger, so do the chances of clashes with the public interest The speculative banter has been doing the rounds of the region's financial centers since the deal was done last week. Hong Kong Internet investment and broadband network company Pacific Century CyberWorks is to take over the city's main phone company, Cable & Wireless HKT, for $38 billion. So the groundlings are wondering, did PCCW's chairman and chief executive Richard Li Tzar-kai get some high-level backroom boost from his father and fellow billionaire Li Ka-shing, the richest and most powerful person in the Special Adminstrative Region? The question is not just about takeover tactics or family goings-on. If father and son worked in concert, then the worries and warnings of SAR democrats, including stalwarts Martin Lee Chu-ming and Emily Lau Wai-hing, seem at least partly justified. Both are fretting, if not fuming, over what they see as the Li family's growing power and privilege, especially since the patriarch snapped back last year at similar criticism. After protestations of being unfairly castigated by, among others, legislator Lee, the tycoon, or rather his son's PCCW venture, seemed to have gotten a special deal: the grant of public land for Cyber-port, a waterfront residential and high-tech development in western Hong Kong Island. Concerns over the Li family's clout increased with the trial and execution of Cheung Tze-keung (a.k.a. Big Spender) across the border in Guangdong province last year. Among his crimes, the gangster had kidnapped Li's elder son Victor in 1996, for a reputed ransom of more than $100 million. Rights advocates protested that the trial should have been conducted in Hong Kong, where many of Cheung's offenses were committed. But most people seemed willing to accept the Li family's presumed concern that the Big Spender would not have been executed even if he were convicted in the SAR and their reluctance to testify about family and business matters. The past week, criticism of favoritism toward Li centered on the listing of his Internet venture Tom.com, which was exempted from a host of listing rules in the small-board Growth Enterprise Market and had obtained a prized GEM stock number without open bidding. But the public again seemed to side with the Lis, just to have a chance at buying Tom.com stock and selling it for quick profits on its first trading day, March 1. A further bone of contention between Lee and Li: the democrat criticized top tycoons this week for opposing a proposal to abolish the Legislative Council's functional constituencies, which would have made more of LegCo popularly elected. The special-interest seats represent business and professional sectors in the council. So far, the Hong Kong public seems not too bothered by the Lis' daunting rise in power and wealth (indeed, many people cheered Richard Li against Singapore Telecom's rival HKT bid). But with the family empire's even more commanding presence in business, the potential for a clash between its interests and those of the public is that much greater. So is the chance of a government decision being seen as favoring the family. The incident that first triggered criticism of Li was a decision by his flagship property company Cheung Kong to sue homebuyers who reneged on contracts after the Asian Crisis collapsed real-estate values. The Lis also control the main power supplier on Hong Kong Island, one of two leading supermarket chains, a major container port, a cellphone service provider, and now the main phone company. The price of such ubiquitous and mammoth success is more and more frictions with the people tasked with watching out for the good of all. cnn.com Tha-Tha-Tha-Tha-That's all Folks!