Explaining the complexities of Hong Kong’s financial securities legislation to enhance trust among small investors through individual case reports as stories

This research project set out with the purpose of contributing to trusting financial securities regulation in Hong Kong for small investors when the system is highly complex. The aim of this particular project, to contribute to that purpose, was to explore sets of cases reported on by the regulators and by the media. The cases were selected on the basis of their variety; that variety being what it is that frightens people about investing which includes being cheated; not understanding the rules; worried about safeguards against contraventions such as money laundering, corruption, insider dealing and more negative images. It is a boundaried study, focusing on financial regulation and practices in Hong Kong. However it surfaces commonalties or learnings for other financial centers. The research was motivated by a need for small investors to understand how the system works, its safeguards and its rate of response to addressing anomalies so that they can invest with more confidence. This document is to contribute to communicating a complex system to the ordinary investor and young trainees or young legal practitioners charged with helping small investors who may have a grievance. It uses legal cases as a form of storytelling or more precisely ‘parabling’ – the good and the bad, the David and Goliath, which serve to illustrate the anomalies in a way that helps people not only to have more understanding of the systems but also to quickly identify with what can go wrong even for the big players.
This research was carried out in part during Hong Kong’s social unrest and before China’s changes to Basic Law (2020) and before the global pandemic of 2020. With these events this research has become historical in a short space of time although nothing significant had changed in financial securities regulation at the time of writing.
The document is in three parts to support navigation and cross-reference: Part 1 is the main context, literature and cases studies. Part 2 contains all the bodies involved in the different cases relating to financial securities and Part 3 contains the Appendices.