HK as a world financial centre? Sorry, professor, it's just one more of those tall stories

'We have many professionals including investment bankers, accountants and lawyers that can help such firms with due diligence and the arrangement of deals. They know the market and also understand the demands of the mainland companies.'

Professor Chan Ka-keung Financial services secretary, Feb 7

There's the academic in the ivory tower for you again - dream, dream, dream. This time Prof Chan dreams of making Hong Kong as big a financial centre as London or New York within five years by pitching listings to poor Chinese provinces.

He has obviously not read the list of listings recently. The investment bankers have been there before him. If there is any corner of China that these salivating listings salesmen have not long explored and exhausted for every tall story they can publish in a prospectus, well, I would like to hear about it.

But I'm far from as confident as he is about the level of professional expertise in Hong Kong. To my mind it consists mostly of a keen intuitive feel for how to get tall stories past the listing committee and then to sneak them under the nose of the Securities and Futures Commission - although, come to think of it, this has never been very difficult.

But when it comes to mergers and acquisitions, the staple diet of investment banking in developed markets, there is not much Hong Kong has to offer. Our market is based on family companies and connections. We don't have mergers, while acquisitions consist of simple uncontested purchases of other family assets.