When Mark Steward was head of enforcement at Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission, the market regulator, he liked to quote a former US Supreme Court justice’s observation that “sunshine is the best antiseptic”.
Before his recent move to the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, Mr Steward set in train a number of investigations that have flooded more than a few dark and cosy rooms with Louis Brandeis’s antiseptic sunshine, causing considerable discomfort for some of the territory’s most powerful business figures.
One of these investigations, which began seven years ago, recently reached Hong Kong’s Market Misconduct Tribunal, a body empowered to hand down non-criminal sanctions for corporate misconduct.