Twelve green groups will boycott a meeting with the Airport Authority today which was to discuss the social and environmental impact of the third runway project.
The green groups have pulled out over what they say is a lack of commitment by the authority to carry out a social-return-on-investment study. A meeting planned at the end of last month was postponed over concern that there was "a divergence of opinion" between the two sides over the study.
While the green groups are pushing for a social-return study and a carbon emission study, the authority, which was initially opposed to conducting a social-return study, has said it has looked at "other evaluation approaches that have been adopted internationally", which it says "may address the nature of your concerns about social and environmental impact".
Evidently, this does not go far enough for the green groups. A letter from them to the authority recently noted: " … we will not meet with the AAHK again in the 19/9 roundtable meeting if we do not receive a commitment from AAHK regarding our requests stated clearly in our joint letter." Their withdrawal from the meeting is a blow to the authority, which is keen to keep them onside. Earlier this year it committed to becoming the "greenest airport in the world", but this may be difficult to achieve without support from the green groups.
The slump in the IPO market has led to the first casualty at the Hong Kong stock exchange with the departure of Eric Landheer, the head of issuer markets. His job was to bring IPOs to the exchange. A spokesman for the exchange told Lai See "We are in the process of realigning some of our business with new opportunities."
The exchange announced earlier this year that it was looking to move into fixed-income and commodities products. We were told that "in the process of this realignment" it was inevitable that this "may incur some personnel changes". Landheer joined the exchange in December 2010 while the IPO boom was in full swing, with Hong Kong the biggest IPO market in the world for the past three years.