Well, excuse me slipping into the vernacular, but who'd a thunked it? More Hong Kong Jockey Club members getting caught with their fingers in the till. (They're lucky they're not in Iran; otherwise, they'd have been caught with their stumps in the till. Boom! Boom!) The Hong Kong Jockey Club stables are beginning to make the Augean stables look like the squeaky clean streets of Singapore by comparison.
No sooner has the dust settled on the case of former Wheelock chief John Hung, whose latest attempt to wriggle out of his guilty verdict by quibbling over the meanings of "agent" and "principal" was givenshort shrift by the Court of Appeal last month, than three more of the Club’s power-brokers, or Voting Members, are nabbed by the ever so slightly kinky ICAC for allegedly "conspiring to solicit and accept bribes to expedite applications from would-be members".
With the charge for fast-track membership being as much as HK$900,000 (US$116,000) a time, and with 20-odd aspirants queuing up (or perhaps not – this is Hong Kong after all) for the right to stick a Jockey Club badge alongside their Guangzhou license plate on their black Mercedes S500, you would have thought that the Jockey Club hierarchy would be eager to stamp this kind of thing out and change the way in which members are brought in.
Not a bit of it.
In an excellent, and very wry, piece,David Webb draws attention to the potential for abuse of the Jockey Club’s membership mechanism, whereby only 200 Voting Members can nominate Full Members. (If three out of 200 have been, allegedly, caught with their snouts in the nose bag, that represents 1.5% of the number, and which organisation would countenance such a proportion of criminals among its decision-makers? And how are we to know that this is not the tip of the iceberg, especially with each membership swapping hands for upwards of a million dollars?)
As usual, the Webbmeister has solutions:
"The club should invite sealed bids from individuals who wish to join. Each bidder would state the price they are willing to pay for membership, and enclose a deposit. The club would then accept bids in descending order of price until the quota of memberships is exhausted. In order to avoid 'winner's curse', clubs can use a uniform price auction in which all the successful bids pay the same price as the lowest successful bid. There should be no subjective qualifications for admission. No nomination requirements, no requirement to be 'the right sort of fellow'. If there are any requirements at all, then they should be objective, such as not having a criminal record, if that is thought undesirable."
Ouch! Having paused for effect, Webbie continues:
"HKJC's M&A [Memorandum & Articles of Association] allows for multiple categories of members. Its directors are known as Stewards. There cannot be more than 12 Stewards, each elected for a 3-year term. They must all be Voting Members, and they are elected only by Voting Members. There cannot be more than 200 Voting Members, and the Voting Members are elected by the Stewards.
This circular system is basically a club within a club. Only the 200 Voting Members can vote at general meetings, so all the other 13,000-odd 'Full Members' are in fact not very full members - they have no voting rights and no say in who runs the Club or how it is run. You might say they are Half-full Members, or Half-empty Members, depending on your perspective."
What can a mere mortal add? Well, only perhaps to note that the Hong Kong Standard itself appears to be getting into the Christmas spirit early, giving us this immortal line in their report:
"A source said [those arrested on bribery charges] are in their 70s and 80s and have maintained low profiles."
Somehow, even allowing for the local propensity forshowing off , one can't say one is entirely surprised they're not shouting it from the rooftops.
No sooner has the dust settled on the case of former Wheelock chief John Hung, whose latest attempt to wriggle out of his guilty verdict by quibbling over the meanings of "agent" and "principal" was given
With the charge for fast-track membership being as much as HK$900,000 (US$116,000) a time, and with 20-odd aspirants queuing up (or perhaps not – this is Hong Kong after all) for the right to stick a Jockey Club badge alongside their Guangzhou license plate on their black Mercedes S500, you would have thought that the Jockey Club hierarchy would be eager to stamp this kind of thing out and change the way in which members are brought in.
Not a bit of it.
In an excellent, and very wry, piece,
As usual, the Webbmeister has solutions:
"The club should invite sealed bids from individuals who wish to join. Each bidder would state the price they are willing to pay for membership, and enclose a deposit. The club would then accept bids in descending order of price until the quota of memberships is exhausted. In order to avoid 'winner's curse', clubs can use a uniform price auction in which all the successful bids pay the same price as the lowest successful bid. There should be no subjective qualifications for admission. No nomination requirements, no requirement to be 'the right sort of fellow'. If there are any requirements at all, then they should be objective, such as not having a criminal record, if that is thought undesirable."
Ouch! Having paused for effect, Webbie continues:
"HKJC's M&A [Memorandum & Articles of Association] allows for multiple categories of members. Its directors are known as Stewards. There cannot be more than 12 Stewards, each elected for a 3-year term. They must all be Voting Members, and they are elected only by Voting Members. There cannot be more than 200 Voting Members, and the Voting Members are elected by the Stewards.
This circular system is basically a club within a club. Only the 200 Voting Members can vote at general meetings, so all the other 13,000-odd 'Full Members' are in fact not very full members - they have no voting rights and no say in who runs the Club or how it is run. You might say they are Half-full Members, or Half-empty Members, depending on your perspective."
What can a mere mortal add? Well, only perhaps to note that the Hong Kong Standard itself appears to be getting into the Christmas spirit early, giving us this immortal line in their report:
"A source said [those arrested on bribery charges] are in their 70s and 80s and have maintained low profiles."
Somehow, even allowing for the local propensity for
2 comments:
Considering these are just the ones that have been caught, you can imagine how many others among the 200 are pulling the same stunt. Perk of voting membership?
Dickens might have been referring to Jockey Club Voting Members in his Pickwick Papers, first published in the year before Queen Victoria acceded to the throne, when he writes of “rascals, to whom [a few pounds finding their way into their pockets] makes no manner of difference, except that the more they gain, the more they’ll seek, and so sooner be led into into some piece of knavery that must end in a crash”.
He was, of course, writing about lawyers.
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