Jake's ViewLittle benefit from greenies' call for CLP subsidies

Green groups are calling on electricity supplier CLP Power to dole out HK$300 million in subsidies each year for the next five years to help consumers reduce their energy usage by 1 per cent.

SCMP, August 13

And they want an immediate response, do you hear? All they have heard so far is "a lot of nonsense responses" but they are determined to "take a strong stance". Oh yes, and the money is to come from profits. Otherwise it's not fair.

Let's look at this one from the other perspective.

Just over a third of CLP is held by the founding Kadoorie family and associated interests. I gather the chairman likes fast English cars and slow French dinners but otherwise isn't notable for high living. Most of the family's dividends are reinvested or disbursed to philanthropic causes by the Kadoorie Foundation.

I have always had time for the family. Kadoorie Farm on the north side of Tai Mo Shan, a research station built to help farmers when Hong Kong still had its own agriculture, is now the most beautiful garden for a long, long way in any direction. I was there on a family outing years ago when old Horace Kadoorie came up to pay his last visit to his beloved orchid garden before he passed away.

Aside from the Kadoories, there are more than 20,000 other shareholders, about half of them retail, mostly resident in Hong Kong, and about half of them institutional from around the world. This institutional holding you can safely estimate to represent tens of millions of individuals.