Lai See | Hospital Authority chief faces professional hearing

At long last the Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants has set a date for a substantive hearing into complaints about the professional conduct of Hospital Authority chairman Anthony Wu Ting-yuk, Ernst & Young, of which Wu was chairman until December 2005, and Catherine Yen Ka-shun, another senior figure at the accounting firm.

The hearing has been set down for five days from May 6 in what is probably the institute's highest-profile case.

In addition to heading the Hospital Authority, Wu is a former chairman of the Bauhinia Foundation Research Centre and the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce. He became a member of the CPPCC National Committee last month, and is an independent non-executive director of the Agricultural Bank of China and Guangdong Investments. He has been mentioned as a potential candidate for chief executive of Hong Kong.

This case has been by far the longest running complaint, having been referred to the disciplinary panel in December 2009. Some say there has been an attempt to stretch proceedings out by swamping the panel with an unusually large number of documents. The complaint relates to the collapse of New China Hong Kong Group (NCHK), which was founded in 1993 by a consortium of investors from Hong Kong, the mainland (including the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office) and Singapore. The group entered voluntary liquidation in 1999 amid claims of HK$100 million.

One of the central issues is the possible conflict of interest on Wu's part arising out of his role as a member of NCHK's executive committee while his firm was its auditor. Wu became deputy chairman of Ernst & Young in 1998 and chairman in 2000. Various lawsuits followed the company's collapse, one of which was against Ernst & Young and Wu, which was settled out of court. At a preliminary hearing last November, the legal teams for Wu and the other respondents argued that the disciplinary committee did not have jurisdiction to hear the case. Those arguments were unsuccessful.