The View | What leadership skills? Anybody can run a big company

On the first trading day after Sun Hung Kai Properties co-chairman Thomas Kwok Ping-kwong and its executive director Thomas Chan Kui-yuen were found guilty of corruption in 2014, SHKP’s shares rose by over just over 2 per cent.

Both men, alongside the recipient of the bribes, former chief secretary Raphael Hui Si-yan, have recently been back in court to unsuccessfully appeal against their convictions and, yet again, the market barely blinked.

The imperviousness of the market may seem peculiar in a city where most of the leading listed companies have an intense personal identification with either a single person or a single family. You might therefore have thought that what happens to these people, as individuals, should have a profound impact on the valuation accorded to their companies.

In the case of the SHK group, the convictions followed a prolonged bout of family infighting that had a slightly greater impact on the share price of their listed companies than the subsequent criminal convictions.

However there are other Hong Kong examples suggesting that personal issues are of less interest to investors than other factors. A case in point is the prolonged illness and withdrawal from management of the SJM empire by its founder Stanley Ho Hung-sun.

SJM shares have taken a battering but this is largely attributable to the general marking down of counters in the gambling sector. Investors appear to be far more worried by this than the fate of Stanley Ho.