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Before his 18th birthday in 1983, David Webb wrote a book on how to programme a ZX Spectrum, one of the UK’s earliest mass market home computers.
In his foreword, Webb thanked his parents for “seventeen years of unbelievable tolerance” as well as his teachers “for ignoring the slight absence of homework on the five A-levels and two S-levels for which I was studying while writing this book.”
His publisher Alfred Milgrom recognised Webb’s “very unusual willingness” to share his understanding of programming with others — an early sign of his proclivity to spread knowledge.
Webb, who died on Tuesday aged 60, was a polymath financier who dedicated his life to pushing for corporate governance reform, democracy and institutional transparency in Hong Kong.
Born in London in 1965, he was soon adopted by a couple in Leicester. Royalties from his book sales helped fund his first forays into financial markets. While an undergraduate at Oxford, he would read the Financial Times in the junior common room before cycling down to the local Barclays to place orders for stocks.
After graduation he began a career in finance in London, right before the “Big Bang” of market deregulation in 1986. He moved to Hong Kong in 1991, fell in love with the city and made it his home.
By 1998, he realised he had made enough money “to be fairly certain I wouldn’t need to work again, so I could offend whoever I liked in Hong Kong”.
Webb believed that improving the city’s financial systems and governance was a more meaningful use of his skills. In the 1990s, Hong Kong’s financial markets were a regulatory wild west. There were weak protections for minority shareholders, a lack of disclosure and feeble oversight by company boards.
He set out to single-handedly change this. In 1998, he founded the non-profit webb-site.com, where he collected public records about Hong Kong’s listed companies. The database became a vital source of information, despite maintaining its 90s-era web design. Ben McLannahan, a former financial journalist now at Barclays, described it as akin to a “one-man Bloomberg terminal”.
“David’s enduring contribution was that of speaking truth to power in a manner so well founded in research and impeccable logic that the powerful had few, if any, convincing answers,” said Ashley Alder, who served as chief executive of Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission from 2011 to 2022. “He was virtually alone in shining a light on collusion, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing in the murkier areas of business life.”
For a city in thrall to markets and money, Webb became something of a patron saint to its retail investors.
In 2017, Webb published the “Enigma Network” exposing 50 companies with extensive cross-shareholdings and what he argued were inflated valuations. Within a month, shares of some of these companies had fallen by as much as 90 per cent.
“His view was no matter who you are or what you are, you run things properly. You behave properly,” said Colin Cohen, a partner at Hong Kong law firm Boase Cohen & Collins. “He would never ever give up. He was like a terrier with a bone.”
Despite his sharp intelligence and dogged work ethic, friends remember him for his kindness. “He was gentle in how he dealt with people . . . He was always concerned about injustice,” said Cohen.
Webb’s generosity ultimately endeared him to the establishment he was fighting to reform. He served as a non-executive director at Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing between 2003-08 and as a panel member for the SFC for 24 years.
His keen sense of governance extended beyond companies. He spoke in favour of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, giving a speech during the 2014 Umbrella Movement calling for a “free market in leadership” and criticising the close relationship between the city’s government and business tycoons.
“He was a believer in public participation in policy, whether that was financial or political issues,” said Philip Bowring, a retired journalist and longtime associate of Webb’s. In June 2025, Webb was made an MBE.
He shut down webb-site at the end of October last year. In his final post, he wrote: “After my loving family, running webb-site.com and campaigning for the public interest in corporate and economic governance since 1998 has been the joy of my life, far exceeding the satisfaction of just beating the market with my investments.”
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