But this wouldn't do for its members. If you want to be important, you want important words to describe yourself and, look again, none there.

What to do, oh, what to do, moaned the society's office holders, and then one day a bright spark came up with an idea.

Let's rename ourselves, he said. Let's see if we can get the word 'Institute' in there instead of 'Society' and let's try the word 'Certified' too. That's a very important sounding word.

What's more, we shall call ourselves public accountants. The public may not know what the difference is between an ordinary accountant and a public accountant but it sounds good, so let's do it.

And they did.

And having thus proved that they were important people because they had an important name for themselves and could thus stand up for their members and for Hong Kong in important accounting matters, they promptly caved in to foreign pressure to adopt an inappropriate accounting standard for Hong Kong.

It has to do with the valuation of properties held as long-term investments. The old standard recognised that property prices are volatile in Hong Kong.

To reflect these movements fully in profit and loss accounts could send corporate earnings up and down faster than the winning entry in a yo-yo competition.

This would hardly satisfy the primary requirement of the accounting profession that a set of accounts present a 'fair view' of a company's doings.

The standard corporate practice was therefore to conduct a market valuation of the investment property holdings every year and show the difference from the previous year in the assets side of the balance sheet with a matching reserve on the liabilities side.

The difference would not go through the profit and loss account, however. This would only be done if the properties were actually sold during the year.

It was a good system. It suited Hong Kong's circumstances and the requirement for a 'fair view'.

It did not, however, suit accountants overseas, who demanded that Hong Kong do things their way because the whole world is the same and everyone knows it.

These people insisted that revaluation surpluses or deficits go directly to the profit and loss account each year and they would not listen to explanations of why we did things differently.

The fact is that they probably could not understand anyway. It is my guess that Hong Kong has more listed property companies than all of the United States.

It is also my opinion that the importance to which this big important new Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants aspired was in inverse proportion to the importance it inspired and it did not stand up for us much.

But now let us take all this back to the Modern Town Redevelopment Corp and the fact that its pre-tax earnings last year of HK$9.17 billion were down 8.5 per cent from the previous year's figure because property income had fallen.

The single greatest reason that this property income was down has nothing to do with cash that actually flowed in or out of the MTRC's coffers.

It has to do only with the fact that in 2005 the company booked HK$2.8 billion in 'change in fair value of investment properties' and last year that figure was HK$2.17 billion, or HK$622 million less.

In other words, the ultimate culprit here is not weak MTR accounts but a weak-kneed, although very important, body of instituted and certified public accountants who wouldn't stand up for a perfectly sensible Hong Kong way of doing things. Perhaps they really could not resist the international pressure in the end.

I'm sure it is what they will claim. Equally, I don't think they tried very hard.

Let us also rename the MTR and call it the Mass Transit Railway Corp again.

Strip the property element out its earnings last year, including investment property and related costs, while assuming that depreciation and finance charges apply to the railway element alone (which they do), and you discover that pre-tax earnings last year were HK$74 million, compared with a pre-tax loss of HK$11 million.

This is hardly reason enough to buy the shares as a play on consumer rail rather than as a play on expectations of continued government gifts of property.

But it is certainly a step in the right direction and I think these results are encouraging, enough so, perhaps, to adopt that name change.