HU Ying
Researcher
22 September 2014 - 21 September 2015

Ying is a graduate of the University of Hong Kong (LLB) and the University of Cambridge (LLM)(first class). Having trained at Clifford Chance, she proceeded to work as a Judicial Assistant at the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal before joining NUS. She also taught on a part-time basis at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include banking law, personal property and restitution.

Research Areas

1. Regulation Of Equity Crowd Funding in Singapore

Equity crowdfunding, a fairly new form of financing, has promise as a means of financing legitimate start-up businesses or projects which may not be able to obtain funds from traditional sources, e.g., banks, venture capitalists and angel investors. However, the cost of complying with existing securities regulations is likely to make equity crowdfunding impractical for the businesses most likely to need it. This paper will consider the rationale for facilitating equity crowdfunding in Singapore, assess the need for additional exemptions for crowdfunding under existing securities regulations, and propose legal reforms which seek to strike a balance between capital formation and investor protection.

2. Public Enforcement for Private Gains: The SFC's Role in Investor Compensation

A notable change in the enforcement strategy of the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) of Hong Kong during the last decade involves the increasing use of civil actions to provide compensation to victims of wrongdoing. This paper is based on an empirical study of these civil actions brought by the SFC since the Securities and Futures Ordinance came into force in 2003. It concludes that the SFC has made valuable contributions to maintaining market integrity by intervening (through these civil actions) to make up for the lack of private enforcement in cases of market misconduct. However, conflicts of interests invariably exist between the SFC, the general public and victims of market misconduct. US commentators suggested that similar conflicts of interests have led public agents to enter into small settlement offers when they act on behalf of the public. This does not appear to be the case in Hong Kong. Civil actions brought by the SFC have often obtained near full compensation for the investors they act for. It is argued that this apparent investor-friendly approach was adopted due to the fact that Hong Kong, as a small jurisdiction which is heavily reliant on foreign investment, has a natural and rational tendency to favour investors over large corporations. Nevertheless, the above-mentioned conflicts of interests manifest in other ways. For example, they partially explain why the SFC may have sometimes obtained compensation for a small group of investors at the expense of other equally deserving investors.