Lai See | Anthony Bolton retires with unfond memories of China

Star fund manager Anthony Bolton is evidently still smarting from the somewhat lacklustre performance of the fund he managed in Hong Kong. He left last year having endured a dismal couple of years managing Fidelity China Special Situations. He arrived in Hong Kong in 2010 - a China bull - having had a truly stellar experience in London where he ran the Fidelity UK Special Situations for 28 years producing annualised returns of 20 per cent.

However, despite his bullishness on China he was unable to repeat his successes with his China investments - to no great surprise from older hands here who felt he didn't have enough knowledge of the market to succeed in the short term. He retired from Fidelity at the end of March.

At a function to mark his retirement Bolton criticised standards of corporate governance on the mainland. Initially he thought corporate governance issues in China were about whether the chairman and the chief executive positions were held by the same person, or whether independent directors held a majority on the board.

"I found that corporate governance is a euphemism for 'are the figures real and is the management lying?', that is, fraud. The Chinese are great liars," the reported him as saying. So evidently no hard feelings there.

Bolton plans to go travelling for a year but you get the impression he will be giving the mainland a wide berth.