Last month, Pacific Concord chairman Wong Sai-chung offered 65 cents a share for the 42.98 per cent of the firm held by independent shareholders. The offer was a 70.29 per cent discount to net asset value of $2.188 per share.

'If the valuations hold up it looks ridiculously cheap,' Mr Filmer-Wilson said. The offer price was a 51.16 per cent premium to the share price before the privatisation offer. But most analysts use discount to net asset value as the key measure to assess property developers' share prices. The stock closed at 61 cents yesterday.

Mr Filmer-Wilson urged the board to look at other options to enhance shareholder value. 'Shareholders in this company have waited a long, long time for the development of a lot of these very interesting assets that the company has. A lot of [the assets] are just on the point of becoming very attractive,' he said.

'None of these things have been very well announced in any annual report or half-year report by the company.'

The privatisation offer was announced less than a month after the firm posted worse than expected annual results, which caused the stock to plunge 12.65 per cent.

The firm reportednet profit of $81.02 million for the year to December, about half the earnings posted in August's interim results. Mr Filmer-Wilson said: 'It is impossible to see from this annual report exactly why or how this turnaround in the second half of the year took place.'

Pacific Concord joint managing director Kwan Kai-cheong said the sharp turnaround was largely due to $106 million of provisions against investments in listed securities, payments yet to be received for sales in a Ma On Shan property project and tax.

Mr Filmer-Wilson asked: 'Are we to believe there was no inkling, no indication to the board between August of last year and the end of December that the actual trend of profitability of the company was going to be so seriously affected?' He said the firm should have released a profit warning before the annual results.