Investor Protection in Capital Markets: The Case of Hong Kong

Investor Protection in Capital Markets – The Case of Hong Kong focuses on the regulatory protections available to public investors who have decided to invest their money and trust in Hong Kong listed companies. This book investigates and expands upon the procedures, regulations, and enforcement mechanisms put in place to ensure investors are given adequate protection for their monies invested, with the objective to provide the public with transparent and sufficient investment information.

This publication applies the investor protection benchmarks as set out in the: (new) Companies Ordinance (Cap.622), Securities and Futures Ordinance (Cap.571), and Main Board (or General Enterprise Market (GEM) Listing Rules.

The publiaction not only analyzes regulation of issuers through the disclosure regime, regulation of intermediaries, and regulation of market misconducts but also the heatedly debated issues related to the Lehman Brothers’ minibonds saga and Alibaba’s controversial dual-share structure.

“[This publication] … is a full treatment of one of the world’s most important capital markets, the Hong Kong stock exchange, HKEx, and associated markets. It is a story of investor protection in incremental steps and over a fairly long period of time. In a single volume, the reader can find a wealth of information about the various regulatory bodies with authority over Hong Kong’s capital markets, the details of its disclosure strategies where issuers are concerned, and the treatment and regulation of intermediaries who occupy the space between issuers and investors – in this case often retail investors who constitute an unusually large fraction of the investor population. Special attention is paid to market misconduct under the Securities and Futures Ordinance (Cap.571) and to regulation of specialized markets. … [T]his book thus describes and documents one of the fastest growing industries, regulation itself.”

From the Foreword by Saul Levmore, William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago