A firm grip on elections

Many business leaders have long made it no secret they do not like democracy, but now it turns out that they sure like votes.' This was the jibe by Democratic Party leader Martin Lee Chu-ming when it emerged earlier this year that some of Hong Kong's leading tycoons were enjoying dozens of votes thanks to the intricacies of the functional constituency system.

Yesterday, the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor issued a report on the May election that contains the most extensive disclosure yet of the system that has allowed, for instance, property tycoon Robert Ng Chee Siong to cast or control about 40 votes.

This system, plus other inequalities in the system, made the group's monitoring of the election highly unusual. It conducted the usual polling-station monitoring with teams from the European Parliament, the Law and Society Trust of Sri Lanka and an ASEAN Human Rights group. But because of the voting system, 'we knew before the election campaign began that the election would not be free and fair, as we know that under the electoral law adopted for the election a minority of electors would be allowed multiple votes'.

At the heart of the multiple-voting are the complex corporate structures in Hong Kong, sometimes for administrative convenience, sometimes for tax reasons.

By law, no person or company may vote in more than one functional constituency. But many of the companies in Hong Kong have dozens, often hundreds, of subsidiaries. Property companies, for instance, will have a company holding each building or development. In some cases, many of these subsidiaries are allocated a vote.

The largest total found by the group was for Mr Ng's companies, where Human Rights Monitor found at least 17 voting companies registered at the Tsim Sha Tsui East headquarters of Mr Ng's Sino Land company. Each can vote once in the Real Estate and Construction functional constituency and once in the poll for the election committee.