何鍾泰

English

Raymond Ho Chung-tai (born in Hong Kong on 23 March 1939, with family roots in Shunde, Guangdong) is a veteran Hong Kong engineer. As an infant during the Japanese occupation his family moved to Shunde for four years before returning; the eldest son of a torch and electroplating factory owner, he attended Pui Ching Primary and Middle School and St Stephen's College, graduated in civil engineering from the University of Hong Kong in 1963, then studied soil mechanics at the University of Manchester and worked as a registered structural engineer for the contractor Taylor Woodrow before taking a doctorate in civil engineering at City University London. He has more than fifty years of civil, structural, environmental and geotechnical experience, ten of them in Britain, and holds an honorary doctorate of business administration from City University of Hong Kong. From 1976 to 1993 he was a partner and senior director of Maunsell (Asia) Consultants, where he was directly responsible for the roughly HK$3 billion Kowloon-Canton Railway electrification and modernisation programme and for government infrastructure works in the Sha Tin and Tseung Kwan O new towns. He was president of the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers in 1987-88, was appointed to the Hong Kong SAR's Provisional Legislative Council in 1996, and from the first Legislative Council in 1998 was elected for the Engineering functional constituency and returned for three further terms, serving about fourteen years until 2012, when he lost the seat to Lo Wai-kok. He was also a Hong Kong deputy to the 10th and 11th National People's Congress and has served as a Hong Kong affairs adviser, a member of the Basic Law Consultative Committee, on the board of the Airport Authority, as founding chairman of the City University of Hong Kong council and as chairman of the Transport Advisory Committee; he now chairs the Dashun Policy Research Centre and the nuclear safety advisory committees of the Daya Bay and Ling Ao power stations. He holds the Silver Bauhinia Star, the MBE and the order of St John and is a Justice of the Peace, and received an honorary doctorate of laws from the University of Manchester.