The Jacobean poet and cleric John Donne once wrote to the effect that families, like states, do well to keep their internal struggles private, and to "compose and determine all emergent differences" behind closed doors. How some of Asia’s most prominent families must be wishing they could have done just that in recent months.
In Hong Kong, investors at Sun Hung Kai’s annual May results meeting were shocked by the absence of the three Kwok brothers, Walter, Thomas and Raymond, who have been fixtures at such meetings since their father died 18 years ago. It then emerged that Walter, eldest of the three and the then chief executive, had gone to the courts to prevent himself from being sacked after disputes with his brothers over the way their company was managed.
Unsavoury details about the two younger brothers’ attempts to have Walter diagnosed with a mental disorder were to follow and although Walter fought back, the courts refused to back him and he was eventually ousted by the board.
In India, the billionaire industrialist Anil Ambani’s dreams of a merger between his firm, Reliance Communications, and South Africa’s MTN group were quashed when his elder brother Mukesh intervened. The two have seldom seen eye to eye. However, if the many market participants who claim that Mukesh was motivated by no more than a jealous desire to prevent his sibling from becoming wealthier than himself are correct, it was a sad day for those looking to do business in India.
In Macau, another sibling rivalry threatened to scupper a deal, although the result for gambling tycoon Stanley Ho was more favourable than for Ambani. The Hong Kong IPO of SJM, his casino business, finally went ahead despite the litigious activities of his sister, Winnie – the latest of which caused a one-week delay to the listing.
Although the circumstances of the disputes differed and their chronological proximity is no more than coincidence, their cumulative effect is to serve as a reminder: at a time when much talk of 11-standard-deviation events and correlations moving to one fills the airwaves and column inches, these disputes demonstrate with stark clarity the unpredictable human factor that shapes markets as much as cold mathematics.
Perhaps some good will come of it all: in Hong Kong, Walter Kwok has called for reforms to the management structure of his firm that would dilute his family’s influence in favour of appointing more outsiders to key jobs. There has been a similar outcry among analysts and senior market participants in India, although it is perhaps expecting too much to suppose that the Ambani brothers will settle their differences amicably as a result.
Nobody wins when decisions are dictated by rivalry and jealousy rather than business logic. It is to be hoped, if not expected, that companies and indeed families that run companies are able to settle their emergent differences as Donne counselled. Sufferers from over-exposure to sub-prime mortgages might also have had reason to turn to Donne lately: it was he, after all, who wrote that "pleasure is none, if not diversified".