In the mid-1990s, Hong Kong tycoon James Ting was a credit to the city.
He had enjoyed a run of success buying and reviving down-at-heel consumer brands. Through his locally listed vehicle Akai Holdings, the slight-framed, bespectacled entrepreneur sat astride a global web of companies. At its peak, Akai had 160 subsidiaries including America's Singer Sewing Machines and Japan's Akai Electric.
Then in 2000, Akai collapsed. It was wound up by its banks, owing creditors US$1 billion. Ting (right), a colourful big spender who once reportedly rode into an investor meeting in Rome on a chariot, fled his US$5 million Shek O mansion, leaving his Rolls-Royce parked on the driveway, and disappeared.
Later this month, the scandal of Hong Kong's biggest corporate collapse will blow open again.
Akai's liquidator, Borrelli Walsh, will sue the failed firm's former auditor, Ernst & Young Hong Kong, for up to US$1 billion in a six-month High Court case set for hearing from September 15.
The claim, which EY Hong Kong refutes, is that the audit firm negligently failed to spot goings-on at Akai that led to its collapse.
Ting is not on trial. Police found him in Macau in 2003. He was imprisoned for false accounting in 2005. A year later, he walked free, his conviction having been overturned because of errors in the prosecution's case.