THE chairman of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, William Fung Kwok-lun, says the electoral reforms passed last week by the Legislative Council have created an unworkable situation for the chamber.
As a functional constituency, the chamber elects its own representative to Legco. Jimmy McGregor is its representative.
Before the reforms were passed, each of the chamber's member companies had one vote to determine its representative. But now each company's directors has a vote. There is no official limit on how many directors a company can have, so in theory there is no limit to how many votes a company can wield.
Mr Fung said: ''Using a company's directors to vote instead of one representative greatly complicates the situation.'' The chamber thought about limiting the number of directors each company could have, but decided it was not practical because each company has its own needs and structure.
Mr Fung said the functional constituencies were created to represent a group of people. Now that the franchise had been extended with the definition of who could vote greatly increased, the functional constituencies might not fill the role they were designed for.
''Instead of getting the best lawyer to represent the lawyers, you could end up with having the clerk who works in a law firm elected to represent the lawyers in Legco,'' said Mr Fung.
