Steve Hemingway

I am going to China today! My plans are:

1. to visit a few more areas of Zhuhai City to see for myself the locations and developments that have been researched by my colleague as promising investments. Sen Yuan Yen is an area I am particularly looking forward to seeing as it is the site of a major new development of leisure and shopping, including a new Carrefour department store,
2. to make contact with freight forwarders, agents and manufacturers in Zhuhai, and possibly Shenzhen, with a view to importing some high margin products into the UK. I have toner cartridges in mind, but I am going to see some factories before making a decision,
3. to catch up with some old contacts in the area, and in HK,
4. to finalise the incorporation of my Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise (WOFE). I am quite excited about this as it is will be licensed to carry out import and export activities for a wide range of products,
5. to talk to everyone who will listen to me about property financing,
6. to find a developer who is interested in working with me to promote his development to UK buyers. This is proving to be problematic, so if you have any contacts in ZH please tell me NOW!!

I have boosted my Adwords campaign by running it through the optimiser process. Please give it a try - put some keywords that you think that a person interested in investing in China property would search for and see if you get a link to Mingwei.co.uk. If you spot some keyword combination that is relevant and has very few sponsored links, please tell me as this should provide a cheap marketing avenue!

I didn't think I'd ever have anything positive to say about Virgin (on the ridiculous) Media, but I have to confess that I am pleasantly surprised by my new broadband connection.

I was about 14 when a Miss Roberts, the Geog. said to Tim Griffiths and to me in 3rd form Geog: "So young, and yet so cynical". I wish I could remember what this was about. I was going to write something about how terrible it would be if the government bailed out Northern Wreck and subsidized one of Beardy's projects to the point of obscene profits, but I really can't be bothered. It's clear to me that the rich and the powerful don't care a damn about the ordinary citizens of this country as long as large amounts of ordinary citizens money is channelled their way, either through direct tax-funded subsidy (such as Virgin Trains) or via the denial of basic economic freedoms allows rent seeking to proliferate in all areas of life, but especially in financial services.

Do you have a commercial (humanitarian effort) project that needs funding of $150+ million? Do you meet these requirements? 1. 150+ Million 2. 25%+ profit margin 3. Strong resume supporting the individual(s) doing the project 4. International projects are acceptable. 5. Projects can be Business or Real Estate Based. 6. No projects that are: Casinos, Commodity Based, Mining, Oil, Bio Diesel, Ethanol, Pornography, a Country with a Dictatorship, and or a Threat against the US. If you meet these requirements and are interested in getting more information, please send me a phone number where you can be reached in order to set up a conference call to decide if we are a good match for each other. Serious Principle Inquiries Only!

I received this invitation a couple of weeks ago. After a number of conference calls, and very many emails, I have reluctantly concluded that this is in fact a scam. I haven't got to the point of proving this, but I believe that the end result of the process will be a request for some up-front fees that will not result in any kind of funding being forthcoming. I am not 100% sure that it is a scam so I have not cited the name, telephone number and email address of the person who contacted me. There is a 0.1% chance that this is entirely genuine, but there are a number of factors that make me too suspicious to risk going forward with an application for funding.

Unfortunately I have unwittingly promoted this proposal to a number of very busy people, which has caused me significant embarrassment. I tried to find phrases from this fishing letter on the net, without success. If you receive an email like the one above (perhaps with the spelling of 'principle' corrected) then I would be interested to hear your view, especially if the invitation leads to equity funding that actually materialises.

Somehow this blog entry has managed to end up as the #1 search result for "Steve Hemingway".

This is a very interesting post, and almost more interesting are the comments that follow it. My instincts are libertarian, but the commenters on this post make some very strong arguments that a capitalist free market approach is simply not viable for providing an acceptable spread of health care.

A Duoist makes an interesting point, which I feel was rather neglected by the other commenters.

This page seems to be all that remains of the Peter Young scandal that filled the newspapers ten years ago. I knew Peter very well, and I still can't believe what he did.

There are a lot of Peter Youngs in the world. There are even two Peter William Youngs, born on the same day in the UK (I would guess in '58 or '59). Peter will remember how he came to know that fact, the second one, I believe, having being born in Scotland.

Peter is by far the most famous person that I've ever known well, personally. We kept in touch for quite a while after leaving Jesus College, but I haven't seen him since 1996, when his world collapsed and I went off to live in Singapore. I hope things have improved for him in the last nine or ten years. I imagine that the strain that he was under in the mid 90's was intolerable.