Extra funds may be needed as more firms collapse
The global financial crisis threatens to clog the city's courts, expose more commercial fraud cases and spark an overhaul of Hong Kong's regulatory system, two of the city's leading legal officials said yesterday.
As more companies are swept into insolvency, an ever-increasing demand for court time may force the city's judiciary to tap legislators for extra funds, Chief Justice Andrew Li Kwok-nang told a crowd of local and visiting legal dignitaries at City Hall last night.
'With the economic downturn, the caseload of the courts can be expected to increase,' he said in an address to the annual opening of the legal year ceremonies.
'The judiciary will strive to cope within the resources that are made available to it. [But] I wish to emphasise that in difficult economic times, as at all times, it is of fundamental importance that the quality of justice must not be compromised.'
Rimsky Yuen Kwok-keung, chairman of the Bar Association, told the audience that the Lehman Brothers minibonds debacle had led to a call to review and possibly overhaul the city's financial industry oversight system, comprised of the Monetary Authority, the Securities and Futures Commission and the Office of the Commissioner for Insurance.
Investors in Hong Kong and abroad had lost billions of dollars on minibonds guaranteed by Lehman Brothers when the US investment bank went bankrupt last September, as the financial meltdown began to gather speed.
