An article in the Standard today made amusing reading: the gobsmacked reporter was "shocked, shocked!" [in Casablanca parlance] that no companies on Hong Kong's second board, the Growth Enterprise Market (GEM), won any Corporate Governance Disclosure Awards.

Hong Kong's disclosure requirements from an accounting perspective are some of the weakest in Asia anyway (who needs to know the breakdown of operating profit?), and those of the GEM are even more iffy.

Even funnier was the revelation that these awards have a 'special' category for mainland companies listed in Hong Kong. A sort of 'Special Olympics' of Disclosure Awards, if you like, for the truth-challenged management boards of China's top firms. The top two winners were Jiangsu Expressway and Shenzhen Expressway, companies whose core operations would be, pardon the pun, rather 'straight-forward'...