Stuart Wolfendale

Likely the most unfortunate outcome of the unholy inquisition into Invest Hong Kong director Mike Rowse’s Empress Dowager approach to spending on the Harbour Fest pop concerts in 2003 is the revealing of how much Rowse earns.

As punishment for losing HK$100 million on the gigs and taking a total of two months holiday out of town whilst he was about it, the inquisition, under Monsignor Rafael Hui, Chief Secretary and witch hunter, fined Rowse HK$160,000 or 0.16% of the dropped clanger, which is not much of a return on your loss but a lot of money you might think for a small and vulnerable senior clerk.

How could the government actually fine Rowse we thought as we scanned the gleeful headlines. On what authority could they take money away from him? In fact, they will not exact it him from as the word ‘fine’ suggests. They simply won’t give it to him in the first place. $160,000 is his salary and at one dark and dismal month’s end it will not appear in his bank account, confiscated for miscreant management. It is something the government has every right to do, a line of small print in the deal with its servants which most choose to put out of mind , like the act of God exemption in an insurance policy.

I never had much time for the Harbour Fest. I never quite fathomed how middle aged bourgeois rocking nostalgically to famous, ageing bands put the pep back into the proletariat which had born the brunt of the Sars outbreak. Later I learned that every time Keith Richards crashed a cord out, it cost a couple of bucks per taxpayer. Yet I neither marveled nor moaned much. There was ever affable roustabout Rowse with his SAR passport, in the ascendant, looking for a nemesis and he found one.

What has woken me afresh to this torpid tale is the punishment. I had quite forgotten the wide open galloping range of the Hong Kong Government’s senior officials’ salaries, particularly if you compare them to the outside world. Mike Rowse is hardly amongst the most exalted of them yet he is paid approximately the same as a deputy permanent under secretary in the UK civil service, the Leader of the Opposition in parliament, the government Chief Whip, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee or the foreign policy adviser to the Prime Minister –and that is all before those chaps pay British tax. What can a civil servant in Rowse’s position be doing to need all that money? After a cheese shaving of tax has been taken off the top , housing and kiddies’ stuff subsidized and medical blessedly free, what do they actually do with it? Stash it and wait for the pension one supposes.

The implications in confiscating a month of Rowse’s booty should have wide implications but won’t, of course. This is one precedent that will not be thought through.

The Rowse principle should be extended to other officers who could be found to have perpetrated expensive cock ups. And not just serving ones either. South Africa had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Let us have a Truth and Retroaction Committee Let the pension payments be confiscate too.

The results would be cruel and unusual and therefore very good TV. Levying the fines according to the weights of the clangers dropped, Sarah Liao would be living in genteel poverty in the Helena May, Michael Suen would be in a bed space up Shamshuipo way and despite the fact that we are giving him a lovely colonial building on Kennedy Road to do nothing in, Tung Chee Hwa would be sleeping under a flyover.

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