David Webb, Hong Kong investor and corporate watchdog, dies at 60

David Webb, an activist investor who challenged Hong Kong’s tycoons and fought for minority shareholders, died on Tuesday in a Hong Kong hospital at 60, his wife, Karen Webb, said. The cause was metastatic prostate cancer, the family said. Mr. Webb, who moved from Britain to Hong Kong more than three decades ago, built a reputation as a tenacious watchdog and created Webb-site, a free public online database that catalogs the city’s companies and their directors.

His 2017 report on a network he called the “Enigma Network” documented previously unknown connections among about 50 companies, a report that the article says caused those companies’ shares to plummet and prompted government watchdogs to investigate share price manipulation that harmed small investors.

Born in London on Aug. 29, 1965, and adopted as an infant by a Leicester couple, Mr. Webb spent two years of his childhood in Bangkok and later graduated from Exeter College at Oxford with a mathematics degree in 1983. He worked for three investment banks in London before moving to Hong Kong in 1991, launched Webb-site in 1998 and by 32 had left paid employment to manage his investments and pursue activism.

He briefly served on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange board after winning a seat in 2003 but resigned a few years later, accusing the exchange of withholding information and succumbing to political concerns. Mr.

Key Topics

World, David Webb, Webb-site, Enigma Network, Hong Kong, Minority Shareholders