By Ifham Nizam

The story of David Gerald and the work he has done for minority investors has been nothing short of extraordinary. Here is a man who had no experience in investing, or in stock markets, but was willing to risk his reputation to stand up against the Malaysian government, internationally known author, Aaron Low said. The author of a landmark book titled, ‘Boardroom Knockout’, featuring share market issues, Low spoke to The Island Financial Review recently in an exclusive interview.

Extracts from the interview:

Q: What inspired you to tell the story of David Gerald’s early experiences centering on injustice in Ceylon and on how they shaped his career and mission?

A: The reason why he did so is simple: justice. When the Malaysian government shut down the Central Limit Order, a system that facilitated the trading of Malaysian shares by Singaporean investors, more than 172,000 investors in Singapore found their funds locked up and frozen in a foreign land. The total? More than S$7 billion.

I asked him why he would even contemplate such a move. After all, he was already in his 50s and approaching what would be the prime of his career as a litigator. He told me that he has always been inspired by a sense of justice. When he was a boy growing up in Ceylon, he saw a group of soldiers brutally assaulting a young man, who was also deaf and mute. Shocked, Gerald wanted to do something for the youth but was frozen by fear. That, he said, was a turning point and he swore he would not let anyone down again – even if that meant taking on a foreign government.

Q: How did David Gerald’s legal work under Singapore’s celebrated criminal lawyer, David Marshall, influence his later advocacy for small investors?

A: If the incident with the youth in Ceylon sparked his desire to pursue justice, his work with David Marshall brought the fight for justice to life. Marshall was Gerald’s mentor and the epitome of what it was to be a criminal justice lawyer. His passion for legal work and commitment to his clients inspired Gerald to do the same.

You can see this in the work he does at SIAS – all of it is geared towards helping the mom and pop investors, who are not the most sophisticated of stock market players.

Q: The founding of SIAS in 1999 was a pivotal moment for small investors in Singapore. What were the biggest challenges SIAS faced when tackling the CLOB issue with Malaysia?

A: The biggest issue that SIAS faced was that they couldn’t even get the Malaysian government to engage them! I mean, it’s not surprising right? Why would the federal government of Malaysia want to even pay attention to a small group of amateurs?

So the first thing that SIAS needed to do was to get recognition that it was a serious player that represented the aggrieved investors. Gerald knew this, which was why one of the first things he did was to get thousands of people to sign up as SIAS investors.

The second big challenge was that the issue was toxic cocktail of tense history between Singapore and Malaysia as well as anti-foreigner sentiments, in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis.

Q: Could you elaborate on SIAS’s approach to resolving corporate governance issues, especially its preference for negotiation over litigation?

A: SIAS has become such an important institution in Singapore’s corporate landscape. Let me put it this way: Asians hate public confrontation. Losing face is as bad as losing money – and in an ugly public fight, chances are both parties will lose both.

Instead, perhaps inspired by consultative communalism, SIAS has decided to go with a “let’s talk about it” approach. Part of the reason why it did so was simply the recognition that SIAS was never going to be so well-resourced to take on corporations that had hundreds of millions of dollars in its bank accounts to fight off lawsuits.

Another, and arguably, more important reason, is that seeking consensus has the highest probability of achieving something when nothing else works. The truth is that angry minority investors turning up at corporate annual general meetings is a common sight. But it is also common that these same investors hardly get anything for their troubles, except maybe that they feel good for a few minutes venting their frustrations in the open.

SIAS prefers to work with companies behind closed doors, over tea and not threats, to resolve issues amicably. SIAS can do so because it carries the weight of thousands of minority shareholders with them; companies also much prefer talking to a rational party rather than emotional angry individuals. This way, the hope is that a compromise may be met. Maybe the company won’t pay the book value of $10 for a company but it is willing to up its price to $7.50 from $5 if SIAS can broker a deal with investors.

I think corporates like to deal with them, while minority investors trust SIAS. This balance is not an easy one to achieve and it took SIAS many years before it could find its equilibrium.

Q: What lessons can today’s corporate leaders and investors learn from SIAS’s unique approach to resolving conflicts outside courtrooms?

A: That life is nothing but a series of compromises because we are all deeply flawed in one way or another. No one is perfect and even good people do bad things in a time of weakness and temptation.

So instead of judging, approach each situation with empathy, honesty and truth. It’s a high ideal but sometimes laying all your chips on the table is the best way to resolve the worst of conflicts.