Fifty Years of Asia: Zafrul Aziz, CIMB
9 May, 201950 Years of Asia: Wei Sun Christianson
9 May, 2019Euromoney, May 9 2019
Full article here: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1f9h19c4w9gn7/laura-cha-building-foundations-from-hong-kong-to-china
Laura Cha has a rare claim to fame: she is the only person to have worked at a top level in the securities regulators of both Hong Kong and China.
She started out at the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) in 1991, when the regulator was still trying to rebuild Hong Kong’s market after the 1987 crash.
“Hong Kong was basically a local domestic stock market,” she says.
She was there for the breakthrough moment of Chinese state-owned enterprises arriving on the Hong Kong market, bringing international attention and greater diversification. This was the birth of the H-share market.
“It’s not just that we attracted all these listings,” she says, “it was two things together – international interest and raised standards – that have attracted confidence in our market consistently.”
Cha was involved in building the foundations of Hong Kong as an international market: IPO processes for state-owned companies, interaction with the People’s Bank of China and devising structures “in the absence of company law or security law in China.”
The SFC, then as now, faces a unique challenge. Most of the incoming listings are from parents outside the regulator’s jurisdiction, because they are on the mainland. So the SFC created mandatory provisions for the articles of association of listed companies, meaning state-owned enterprises had to meet governance requirements beyond their company law.
“We could not have foreseen that Chinese companies would account for more than 60% of our listed companies’ combined market cap and that half of our daily turnover would be in China-related stocks,” she says.
