Choy's podcast - Life and business in Asia

Sustainable investing means ESG (= environmental, social and governance). ESG is a hot topic and with all the new realizations we gained due to the pandemic, ESG will become more and more important. This is a good thing as it is meant to assess and rank companies based on environmental, social and corporate governance indicators to select the better sustainable, responsible and ethical investment opportunities. So time to learn more about it! I have invited Mr. Tom Liu from GreenCo ESG Advisory Ltd in Hong Kong that consults listed companies about ESG regulations of the Hong Kong stock exchange, to tell us more about the topic. 

Contact details Tom Liu: https://greenco-esg.com/, [email protected], +852 2873 3612.

It was great to see the attention Joyce Bijl got for the podcast interview in December about her planned fundraising triathlon in Dubai. She was able to finish the race AND to raise an enormous amount for cancer research with the Flying Dutchman team that  was participating with the triathlon from all over the world. Listen to our talk to hear all about it! 

Donating to Joyce's cause is still possible but that will end soon (https://thuistriathlon.mvdwfoundation.nl/actie/joyce-bijl/donateurs). However, if you want to donate to cancer research, there are still great charities out there. An example is https://sparkleupyourmind.com/ founded by Lianne Grootings Ritzen, someone who impressed and inspired us so much with her positive, strong mindset and the way she shared with the world what she was going through when she was dealing with her illness.  

In loving memory of Lianne and my friend Jennifer C.

IG: sparkleupyourmind.bylianne

IG: joyce.bijl.9

For this Dutch Business Lawyers Abroad episode, I am going to Antwerp in Belgium! All the members of DBLA are legal experts in the country where they are located but they are originally from the Netherlands. We give companies, entrepreneurs and individuals who are not familiar with the local environment the help they need. Often legal support but also sometimes referrals to reliable relations or practical advice about cultural differences or how things are done in that country.

I am interviewing Marinus Vromans who has been in Belgium for over 25 years. First in Brussels and nowadays in Antwerp. Marinus shares in this interview his rich experience and knowledge of Belgium, the Belgian business culture and the legal system there. He also tells about the pitfalls that are unforeseen by non-Belgians so a must-hear interview if you want to learn more about doing business in Belgium! 

Marinus' firm is Sirius Legal and the firm's website is https://siriuslegaladvocaten.be/en and you can contact Marinus by his email [email protected]

DBLA is https://dbla.nl

New year and new season! In this episode I have 3 brave entrepreneurs (all French!) in Hong Kong who just started their business.

1. Charles de la Portbarré from Monsieur Butterfly, with his amazing and beautiful products, works with a business structure that is designed to also contribute to the environment;

2. Christine Deschemin from Renewed Edge who launched the first self-hypnosis app in Asia, the UpNow app. Her purpose is to help people live a healthier, happier life and achieve peak performance. 

3. Bastien Curry from BC Advisory who took advantage of new opportunities in the real estate industry, is sometimes the lucky and successful entrepreneur who sometimes suffers from lack of sleep.

They share with me how they started and how it feels to be an entrepreneur. Listen and enjoy, also to hear about the great discounts from Monsieur Butterfly and Bastien. If you have missed it, you can always reach out to Charles, Bastien or myself directly! Christine will be happy to give away 3 annual subscriptions to the UpNow app to the first listeners who contact me directly.

Contact details: 

Monsieur Butterfly: www.monsieurbutterfly.hk and IG: @monsieurbutterflyofficiel 

Christine Deschemin: www.renewed-edge.com and Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/christine-deschemin and https://upnow.com

Bastien Cuny & BC Advisory: www.bc-advisory.com and Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/bastiencuny

Today I am going off topic for a very good reason: my good friend Joyce Bijl is going to do a fundraising triathlon (swim 3,8km, cycle 180 km and run (walk) 21,1 km) on 9 January 2021 as part of the Flying Dutchman Team to raise money for cancer research. In 2014 Joyce transformed herself as she was tired of being unfit by participating in the Oxfam Trailwalker (100 km run through the HK hills), stepping in the ring for a white collar boxing fight for a benefit gala and finishing a 6 day ultramarathon through the Sahara, the Marathon des Sables. Joyce was unstoppable until cancer hit her in 2018. She is grateful for the treatment she received which enabled her to start to recover and to slowly participate in the races again. Listen to her interesting story and donate to the cause with the following link: https://thuistriathlon.mvdwfoundation.nl/actie/joyce-bijl?fbclid=IwAR1NKw0vS44OIU_D_cQaiVoBeMA8OhM-FzZRCcaOWNKnh-nw4F6C6_uacRM&locale=en

The Oxfam Trailwalker: https://www.oxfamtrailwalker.org.hk/

Marathon des Sables: https://www.marathondessables.com/en

Joyce's contact: Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joyce-bijl-98933910 and IG - https://www.instagram.com/joyce.bijl.9/?hl=nl

Mentioned book: Taming Tigers by Jim Lawless

More info about the leading athlete Maarten van der Weijden: https://3athlon.nl/maarten-van-der-weijden-kijkt-uit-naar-thuistriathlon-jezelf-verbeteren-is-een-leuk-spelletje/?fbclid=IwAR2pv4o3uPsGGhJaoODXe-xbS_CgvY7FDM-XDH3kDzojlmLUN1G7Ulw2kCU 

IG of the Flying Dutchman: the_flying_dutchman_team

Jay Thornhill is a real example of a success story of a foreigner making it in China as he is one of the 3 co-founders of Baopals, a website for English speaking consumers in China to access Taobao, Tmall and JD. What started as an entrepreneurial adventure between three friends living in the same building, Jay, together with Charlie Erickson and Tyler McNew managed to build a profitable company within a year with no funding and no experience in ecommerce and it’s still growing more than 4 years later. Baopals has often appeared in international news as an example of a successful company with foreign owners, and I read somewhere that over 250 million RMB of merchandise value has been sold through the platform. Baopals even has their own Wiki page! 

You can find Baopals on www.baopals.com and on WeChat and Jay on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thornhilljay and by email:; [email protected]

It is clear that we have to change the way we live our lives in order to stop how we are damaging the planet. That change can not happen soon enough and the impact should be as big as possible. 

My today's guest, Chris Brown wanted to contribute to that change. So 18 months ago, he started ReThink HK and he worked relentlessly on creating the launch of the Sustainable Business Forum & Solutions Expo in Hong Kong. Despite the difficult circumstances caused by Covid19, the expo was a huge success with over 800+ visitors live and online back which took place in October 2020. And now Chris is already busy together with his colleague, Tiffany Liang, a fresh graduate from HKUST with an Environmental, Management & Technology degree and other team members to create next year's event. In this interview I am talking to Chris and Tiffany about their drive to contribute to a better and greener Hong Kong, why this is so necessary and how Chris journey as an entrepreneur started. 

You can find ReThink HK:

Website: https://rethink-event.com/

IG: https://www.instagram.com/rethink_event/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enviroeventshk/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rethinkhongkong

For this Dutch Business Lawyers Abroad episode, I am going to Moscow! All the members of DBLA are legal experts in the country where they are located but they are originally from the Netherlands. We give companies, entrepreneurs and individuals who are not familiar with the local environment the help they need. Often legal support but also sometimes referrals to reliable relations or practical advice about cultural differences or how things are done in that country.

I am interviewing Lodewijk Schlingemann who has been in Russia for two decades. I will ask Lodewijk to tell us more about his legal practice in Moscow and the Russian (business) culture and ask him about juicy anecdotes or shocking stories and check with him how the atmosphere currently is in this part of the world.

Lodewijk''s firm is Juralink and the firm's website is https://www.juralink.nl/en and you can contact Lodewijk by his email [email protected]

In the past decade, we handled quite a few cybercrime cases where the culprits aim to establish fraudulent fund transfers. They usually succeed by hacking email accounts, taking over the email correspondence without the parties’ knowledge and give instruction to pay the funds to a bank account that is controlled by the criminals themselves.

If the scam is discovered at an early stage and the funds are transferred to a bank account in Hong Kong (also happens if the case has further nothing to do with HK), it is key to immediately inform the local police. Together with the bank, the Joint Financial Intelligence Unit can freeze the bank account and try to retrace the funds (but in many cases, the money is already gone…). The victim should also inform the police at their place of business, the involved banks, the party on the other side, do their own (IT) investigation if possible and stop using the hacked email accounts.

Please be warned that these scammers work very diligently: they take over the email correspondence for quite a while, call the victim and impersonate an existing person with an unsuspicious telephone number displayed, pretend to be a bank associate who helps with a (real) software update, convince the victim by using details only known by the inner circle, produce fake invoices and so on. They also have the most advanced equipment and published information show that the number of cases are rising unfortunately which means that these scammers have access to more funds to finance their activities.

For this podcast I invited Mr. Gerard Morada to share his experience as a criminal law litigator in these kind of email scam cases. As a Hong Kong lawyer he was able to retrieve some funds recently for a mutual client. We also talk about the variations, the prevention and the way to handle if the victim finds out about the fraud in the hope to warn as many people as possible.

You can find Gerard Morada on his firm's website: http://www.mcalai.com

Ron Oren is the founder and CEO of Trips@Asia, a travel company with more than 20 years of experience in creating private and custom made adventure tours in Asia for small groups and individuals. Always when we receive emails from Ron as he is a client of Equasia, we dream away about the destinations mentioned in his email signature: Mongolia, Bhutan, Vietnam, Japan, Siberia, etc. 

Of course the pandemic hit Ron hard as so many countries closed their borders. From his office in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Ron tells me how he started his travel business, what he did when he received the Covid news, what kind of an entrepreneur he is, how he sees the future now that the pandemic will make things much harder and so much more. 

You can find information about [email protected] at https://www.tripsatasia.com and on IG, FB and Twitter. Feel free to email Ron at [email protected].