When he was chairman of Hong Kong’s Standing Committee on Company Law Reform, Court of Appeal judge Anthony Rogers was known for his sharp tongue. He once compared stock exchange regulators to “rabbits guarding the lettuce.” His committee, set up in 1984 to provide counsel on corporate governance to Hong Kong’s financial secretary, has dismissed calls for shareholder class-action lawsuits, saying they are ripe for abuse, and rejected as unworkable a proposal to fund a minority shareholder association through a levy on stock trades. So it wasn’t surprising that Rogers, 58, would get in his last licks before stepping down from the committee last month. The judge complained to Institutional Investor that he had tried time and again to persuade asset managers to participate in formulating corporate governance policies. “They are ready to go to public conferences and talk about it,” grumbled Rogers, “but when you want them to come and do some work, they are all too busy.”
