Richard Li's public relations team usually energetic in tracking down mistakes and demanding they be fixed

PCCW's public relations team is fastidious in combing details of the company's news coverage - but never asked for repeated descriptions of Richard Li Tzar-kai as a Stanford graduate to be corrected.

Mr Li's media minders, who are known to scrutinise everything written about him and PCCW, have even complained about other 'errors' in a story that describes him as a graduate, but failed to clarify that point.

The company's publicity material has for years described Mr Li as a graduate. Last year's PCCW press kit says he 'was educated in the US and holds a degree in computer engineering from Stanford University'.

The claim has been repeated as fact since at least 1995 in publications ranging from the South China Morning Post and the Economist to Asiaweek and Variety, apparently with no objection from Mr Li or his public relations team.

Mr Li did not even ask for a correction from Time magazine when, in April last year, it ran a cover story on his rise to success in which he was described as a Stanford graduate. 'We never got any request for anything like that [a correction], definitely not,' Time writer Anthony Spaeth, who worked on the story, told the Post.

There is no evidence Mr Li personally has claimed to have graduated, and the statement has not appeared in documents filed by his companies with securities regulators. But his failure to speak out about the error left some observers last night wondering whether other oft-made statements about Mr Li's background - among them that he used to work at McDonald's while he was a student - were true.

PCCW refused to answer questions from the Post about whether Mr Li sat any of his final exams, and whether there may be other 'mistakes' in his resume.