Someone high up in government told me tycoon Lee Shau-kee is livid that the Tsang administration humiliated him by investigating his firm's possible wrongdoing involving the sale of luxury Mid-Levels flats. How true that is I don't know. But it's safe to say that Lee cannot be happy with the probe. This throws up a question: is he simply angry at being investigated or angry the government dares to investigate him?
If you state that Hongkongers are equal under the law, you'll probably get guarded agreement. But if you say that includes the tycoons, you'll get a cynical laugh. The tycoons, you'll be told, are an untouchable breed. That belief is so ingrained in our psyche that we treat it as fact.
We believe it to be a fact that Hong Kong's super-rich are too powerful and well connected to be touched. Last week's TV images of President Hu Jintao singling out tycoon Li Ka-shing for special treatment fit right into what we have long believed to be true - that Hong Kong is really two societies, one more equal than the other. We have the ordinary people and we have the elite who are allowed to play by their own rules.
Most people will have no trouble believing Lee is indeed livid, and it's because the government has dared to investigate his Henderson Land - one of Hong Kong's most powerful property firms.
But that doesn't mean our government is daring. No one would argue if you stated as fact that ours is a government that kowtows to the elite class. It is the public that is growing gutsy.
The public's patience with business-sector greed snapped when Henderson Land used only 'lucky' numbers for the floors of its luxury Mid-Levels block so it could demand higher prices. People thought it preposterous that the top floor of the 46-storey building could be marketed as the 'lucky' 88th floor. They saw it as yet another example of a compliant government letting the elite class play by its own rules.
They got even madder with Henderson's dubious boast that some flats in the building had fetched record prices. It was all this outrage that forced the government to go after Henderson. The government would never have dared on its own.