“What do you expect your effective tax rate will be?”

Mr Lau nodded his head: “Sorry, that’s confidential.”

To his credit, the company’s professional hired-hand, i.e., the CFO, jumped up to the podium and suavely intervened, sharing this obviously innocuous shred of information with the crowd.

But it was a funny moment. And attending this event spark an idea for a broader segment report – on whether companies that traded at “dodgy discounts” sometimes offered good value for risk.

The object of this only slightly tongue-in-cheek report was to identify firms which had pretty good franchises, but more cheaply than peers because of poor transparency or galling past management decisions. Was the risk worth the reward?

It was not an original strategy on my part. Hedge funds in particular are known to sometimes take their chances on companies that are “undercovered” – which is often another way to say too murky to risk researching.

By taking a walk on the wild side, intrepid investors can sometimes get a pretty good deal. Or who knows, maybe there is even a secret belief that those who play by the rules can never really make a killing.

The Lau brothers had in past shown a real nose for market timing, like selling Entertainment Building at a market peak. Yes, they blew the proceeds with a bad bet on HSBC warrants, to the dismay and shock of minority shareholders. But surely these good chaps learned a lesson after that one?

Then there was the stroke of callous genius in kicking out a long time, reliable tenant, the beloved Japanese department store Seibu, from its Causeway Bay location. Not only did this thwart retail rival Dickson Poon, who owned Seibu, but the firm later squeezed more revenue per square foot by subdividing the space into a bunch of separately rented stalls.

In a cartel-prone town where it sometimes seems like five families own everything, it’s hard not to cheer the rare instance of actual cut-throat competition.

Anyway, soon after I penned this, er, brave report, Thomas Lau resigned his position at Chinese Estates because of an insider trading conviction; and just last year, Joseph Lau had to turn over the firm to his son after a Macau-based bribery and graft conviction.

Do we never learn our lessons? I don’t mean the Lau’s. I mean only two years ago a burning idea took ahold of my mind. The Russian market was trading at just 2x earnings, and I heard someone call this a “thug discount.”

It didn’t seem Russia was trading at 2x just from a prescient view on oil; other commodity stocks, and the price of oil itself, were holding up well enough. Rather this seemed to have more to do with the growing impatience with cronyism, with abuses of minorities, with Vladimir Putin himself. But 2x? Come on!

One is busy on life and I never followed up on this idea of writing a “thug discount” buy report on Russia, thank goodness.

Because, of course, the market was right. Today Russia is a basket case - caught up in a conflagration in Ukraine, suffering global sanctions, and with its key export crashing and burning.

This is not to say less-transparent firms, or countries with poor rule of law, do not know how to make money. And as we learned this year with Sun Hung Kai Properties, even the bluest of blue chips in Hong Kong can dabble in bribery.

But really, what was I thinking? The risk-reward equation just ain’t worth it, much of the time. And it’s ugly. This is my new year’s resolution: no more endorsing bad behaviour.

At least not till 2016.