When Hong Kong Stock Exchange chairman Ronald Li Fook-shiu faced a bloodthirsty media following his unprecedented decision to close the exchange for four days during the crash of October 1987, the Post carried the now-famous picture of the tycoon jutting a finger at a reporter who had the temerity to question his handling of his own financial affairs during the crisis.

An epic tantrum followed, but three short years later, Mr Li was looking a little more subdued. Again on the front page of the Post, he was pictured in the back of a prison van after being found guilty of two charges of corruption and accepting a reward while exchange chairman, and sentenced to four years in jail.

Mr Li was not the only wealthy corrupt operator shamed on the newspaper's pages. The Carrian scandal, following the collapse of the Carrian property empire in 1983 with debts of $8 billion, was a tale of corruption, greed, international intrigue, suicide and murder - one of the most brazen financial scams the world has witnessed.

Carrian boss George Tan Soon-gin, who arrived from Singapore in 1972, launched a series of deals which - complete with smoke, mirrors and a web of shelf and offshore companies portraying Carrian as highly profitable - succeeded in suckering the territory's most seasoned money-men.

By the time the ICAC took over what was to be a much criticised, multi-million-dollar investigation, the billions lent by several banks were gone and main props for Carrian such as Malaysia's Bank Bumiputra simply went under.

A swimming pool suicide by a Carrian adviser and lawyer, the murder of a Bumiputra auditor at the Regent hotel, and a mysterious car crash which killed a judge who had presided over the case added grisly meat to the bones of corporate scandal.

Tan was eventually jailed for three years in 1996, and a supporting cast, including a former Bumiputra chairman extradited from Britain and several other bankers, all had their day in court and were jailed after a case described by the judge who sentenced Tan as a 'mockery of justice' because of its huge length and cost.

Even tycoon Li Ka-shing had a brush with the law - and the Post. In 1986, he and other directors of Cheung Kong Holdings were found by the Insider Dealing Tribunal to have been culpable of insider dealing transactions surrounding the sale of 55,634,000 International City Holdings shares by Cheung Kong-controlled company Starpeace in 1984. The verdict came after Li had successfully sued the Post - in which his Hutchison Whampoa was a shareholder - for leaking the story.

Hong Kong's business titans have had more than their fair share of credit where it was due from the Post, however. And there can be little doubt that the business section has been perhaps the most accurate chronicler of the rise of Hong Kong, Inc.

'Reporting on Hong Kong's non-stop financial markets, booms, busts, lurid financial scandals but ultimately remarkable economic transformation has been at the centre of the paper's mission,' says current business editor Simon Pritchard.

'Hong Kong has morphed from a sleepy trading station to a manufacturing hub and later into today's modern services centre. Along the way companies have risen and fallen, thriving industries were born overnight and many faded just as quickly.

'The common thread has been Hong Kong firms' hard-nosed economic realism and ability to respond to the sniff of opportunity.'

The Post also covered the roller-coaster ride that saw Hong Kong's colonial firms yield in dominance to local property players, and the rise of giant mainland companies in recent years.

Ray Bashford held the business reins from 1997 until earlier this year, covering perhaps the most tumultuous period in Hong Kong's financial history, which began in July 1997 when Thailand's finance minister took a decision which triggered regional chaos.

'His devaluation of the baht also propelled the Post to the centre of a story which was to dominate world headlines for months,' Bashford recalls. 'The repercussions of the crisis rumbled on for the three of the remaining five years that I was business editor.

'During the two years before the crisis, the markets enjoyed a boom, driven by 'Red Chip' fever. Funds poured into any stock with a China connection in the months preceding the June, 1997 handover.

'Sorting fact from fiction became a nightly event at news conference amid the mania which drove the market to record after record. But the reaction to this euphoria came hard and fast in the second half of 1997. The market lost almost a quarter of its value in one week as investors fled amid mounting concern about the region.'

International currency speculators then set their sights on the Hong Kong dollar, which unlike most other regional currencies remained pegged to the US dollar.

'A piece of Hong Kong's economic history was being written every day during this phase of the crisis,' Bashford says.

'The dramatic intervention of the government to prop up the currency dominated the front pages of newspapers around the world. It was common to have requests from three or four international media groups each night for interviews with reporters in the business section.'

Amid all this, Hong Kong played host to the World Economic Forum in 1997. With tens of thousands of delegates from over 100 countries, Hong Kong had seen nothing like it. 'To mark the event, on each of the six days it was held the Post published a separate lift-out section which was self-financing through advertising,' Bashford says.

'It was a unique product, a model for later special reports and also a tribute to the journalists who literally doubled their workload to get it out.

'None of Hong Kong's corporate giants went under during this crisis, although they were all badly battered. However, a home-grown investment bank, Peregrine, became entangled in an Indonesian taxi company and a bundle of Korean investments which brought it crashing down. It was one of Hong Kong's biggest corporate crashes and was reported exclusively on page one of the Post on the morning the receivers went in.'