Wednesday 30th November, 2005

Dear Reader,

Stanley Ho says wait until 2046, when he will be 125. He doesn't want to see universal suffrage in his lifetime. In the crudest of remarks, the man whose fortune was built on the gambling losses of others promises that property prices will shoot up at least 20% if the constitutional proposals are passed. How stupid does he think the citizens of Hong Kong are? If nothing else, the gerontoplutocrat provides us with more entertainment than we can get in his casinos. Meanwhile raving Sir Gordon Wu, who in his last prospectus gave his nationality as British and who named his son "Thomas Jefferson", has obviously forgotten Nobel Laureate Martin Luther King's million-man march, telling us that exercising our rights to peaceful assembly and free speech will get us nowhere. We'll see about that.

Now for our second story on the constitutional proposals...

NEW ARTICLE
20% of 70 is not 12 (30-Nov-05)
A little-noticed provision of the Government's constitutional proposals seeks to contravene the Basic Law by restricting the percentage of legislators who can hold right of foreign abode to less than that provided by the Basic Law. If the proposal proceeds into local law, then we will consider bringing a judicial review. Ironically, when it suits them, the Government proposes a percentage nomination criterion for the Chief Executive rather than the absolute number in the Basic Law.
http://webb-site.com/articles/legcoforeign.asp

RECENTLY ON WEBB-SITE.COM
Corporate Voting in HK Elections (28-Nov-05)
In our first article leading up to the march for universal suffrage on Sunday, we look at the failure of HK's Government to abolish the small-circle corporate voting system which secures business dominance of the Functional Constituencies and a veto in LegCo. We illustrate it with an investigation of the Transport constituency electorate.
http://webb-site.com/articles/corpvote.asp

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David M Webb
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