Franklin Lam case raises doubts about Exco role
Stephen Vines says Lam affair raises troubling questions about Exco's role
Let us assume for one moment that Franklin Lam Fan-keung, the most recent of the scandal-hit government appointees, has a perfectly believable story, namely that when selling two properties just before new measures were announced to cool prices in the residential market, he had no prior inside knowledge of these measures despite being a member of the Executive Council.
If this is so, what does it tell us about the function of the government's most senior advisory body?
The Basic Law states that the chief executive shall consult Exco before making important policy decisions. It is hard to imagine that a crucial decision about how the property market is regulated can be described as anything other than important. Yet if Lam's story is true, Exco was bypassed.
The council does not have executive powers - these are vested exclusively with the chief executive himself - but it is supposed to advise. Lam can only have been chosen for membership on the basis of his considerable knowledge of the property industry, yet we are told that when the government was thinking about cooling measures, it chose not to speak to the Exco member most qualified to furnish advice.
If this is so, it remains very unclear what purpose Exco serves. The Basic Law suggests its role is important but does not spell out the extent of this importance and its members are assumed to have a higher status in the government pecking order than the largely powerless members of the legislature, even though they have no electoral mandate, notwithstanding the fact that three were plucked from the lower chamber to sit at the Exco table.
As matters stand, Exco membership is equally divided between 16 so-called "official" members, in other words, government ministers, and 16 "non-official" members, who are not in the government, although four of them have been there not so long ago. The membership of non-officials is heavily biased towards the business and finance sector, which accounts for over a third of the seats, leaving two for leftist party members and the traditional seat for the Heung Yee Kuk.