Some US-based executives at accounting giants Deloitte and KPMG have been advised not to use their usual work phones in Hong Kong, the Financial Times has reported, citing unidentified sources with knowledge of the matter.
According to the report, some executives said their organisations were “concerned about the risk of hacks and, in particular, the chance that data about their clients could be accessed.”
One UK-based consultant at a Big Four firm – as Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PwC are colloquially known – was cited as saying that consultancies had generally become “increasingly risk averse,” in part because of fear of legal liability for confidentiality breaches.
An executive at a global consultancy said senior staff were reluctant to visit Hong Kong as a result of the inconvenience brought on by the advisory.
The Financial Times’ report also said McKinsey consultants had taken separate phones when travelling to Hong Kong.
Finance hub
Deloitte, KPMG, and McKinsey declined to comment to the FT. PwC said it did not have a phone policy for working in Hong Kong, while an EY executive said they were unaware of such a policy. The firm itself declined to comment.
Deloitte, KPMG, and PwC were among several Western firms that took out newspaper adverts to congratulate Chief Executive John Lee on being appointed as the city’s leader last year.
The news comes amid Hong Kong’s effort to reassert itself as a global financial centre that leverages its One Country, Two Systems framework, just weeks after the city’s de facto central bank, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, hosted a financial summit attended by C-suite executives including Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon and Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman.
Hong Kong’s finance minister Paul Chan also said at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco earlier this month that Hong Kong hoped to bring US companies to the city and broaden its “network of friends.”
The Chief Executive’s Office did not give a direct response to the issues raised in the report when approached by HKFP, but a government spokesperson said that “[m]ost of the crime-prevention laws in Hong Kong are applicable to the online world as in the physical world. Hong Kong is one of the most liberal and easiest places to do business in the world…”
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