2025 Hong Kong Community Workshop with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius

Alice Huang

Registered Foreign Lawyer, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius

Alice Huang concentrates her practice on private investment funds, advising registered and unregistered investment advisers based in the United States and in the Asia Pacific region on the formation, structure, and ongoing management of investments in global markets. Alice also represents institutional investors in negotiating operating and side letter agreements for investments in global private funds.

Prior to joining Morgan Lewis, Alice practiced at a top regional law firm, resident in Hong Kong, and before that she worked at other top US law firms focusing on private investment funds and cross-border transactions. From 2012–2014, she served as general counsel for an Asia Pacific private equity fund based in Hong Kong, where she managed the companywide legal, compliance, and tax functions with respect to the company’s operations and investments in China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Tokyo, and the United States.

Prior to practicing law, Alice was a senior tax manager with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu in Los Angeles, where she advised clients on inbound and outbound tax transactions. She also spent a year in Shanghai assisting multinational clients in China with cross-border and China tax and regulatory issues, including mergers and acquisitions, structuring, feasibility studies, transfer pricing and foreign exchange.

Thomas Deinet

Executive Director, SBAI

Thomas Deinet was appointed Executive Director of the SBAI (previously known as the HFSB) in 2008. In 2007, Thomas joined the working group to project manage the development of practice standards proposed by 14 leading international alternative investment managers that led to the establishment of the SBAI.

Prior to joining the SBAI, he was a senior manager at Oliver Wyman, where he extensively worked with major financial institutions in Europe covering asset management as well as corporate and investment banking. Thomas also worked as an analyst in energy trading for a major commodities trading firm.

Thomas is a graduate of the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, with a major in industrial engineering and holds an MSc from Purdue University, USA. Thomas is a CFA charterholder.

Ash Gupta

Head of Asia ODD, Albourne Partners

Ash Gupta is the Head of Asia ODD at Albourne Partners, an alternatives investment advisor covering hedge funds, private equity, private credit, real estate and real asset funds.

Prior to Albourne, he was the Chief Operating Officer at Ascender Capital, an Asian equity-focused hedge fund, and the Head of Business Development for Bagan Capital, an emerging markets private equity firm. Previously, Ash was on the Asian Equity Derivatives team at Societe Generale and an Analyst at Private Capital.

He received a BA in Economics from Tufts University and a PGC in Financial Engineering from Stanford University.

Xinyu Hong

Chief Operating Officer , GCI Asset Management

Xinyu Hong is the Chief Operating Officer of GCI Asset Management, HK Limited. Ms. Hong set up the Hong Kong office in 2018 and oversees the business development, risk management, compliance and operations functions of the company. Over the past decade, she has developed wide range of expertise across equity, credit and other macro derivative products, across front-to-back roles on both buy and sell side.

Prior to joining GCI in 2016, she worked at Goldman Sachs Japan in Credit Structuring and Marketing, participated in cross regional origination projects and raised funding from Japanese financial institutions for sovereign and corporate clients within the Asia-Pacific region. Ms. Hong started her career with Deutsche Securities Japan in Tokyo.

Ms. Hong holds a Bachelor of Engineering from Keio University.

Lesli Ligorner

Partner, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius

K Lesli Ligorner has more than 20 years of experience serving clients on a wide range of labor and employment matters, with more than 15 of those years spent on the ground in China. She has been advising a broad range of financial services; telecommunications, media, and technology; life sciences; and general manufacturing clients on the full suite of employment issues in China, including involving hiring and termination, and discrimination and harassment policies, training, and investigations.

Lesli leads the labor and employment practice in APAC and handles cross-border employment matters and internal investigations across the APAC region. She advises on global mobility and immigration, leaves of absence, wage and hour laws, intellectual property protection, and unionization and collective bargaining.

Lesli’s practice further includes compliance counseling and training covering establishment and enforcement of company policies, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and local anticorruption compliance, export controls, data protection and cybersecurity issues, and employment and anticorruption due diligence in mergers and acquisitions and related internal investigations.

For three consecutive years, Lesli was listed as one of the “Attorneys Who Matter” in the labor and employment category by the Ethisphere Institute. She has also been identified as one of the top 150 lawyers in China byChina Business Law Journal for three years running and one of the top 100 global female investigations lawyers by Global Investigations Review, ranked Band 1 in Chambers Global and named to the Legal500 Hall of Fame for China Employment & Labor, and named “Labor & Employment Lawyer of the Year” by Business Law Awards APAC and “Lawyer of the Year” for Labour & Employment by China Law & Practice and AsiaMoney Women in Business Law.

Lesli is admitted to practice in New York and New Jersey.

Phillip Meyer

General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer and Co-Chief Operating Officer, Oasis Management Co. Ltd.

Phillip Meyer joined Oasis in 2007 and serves as General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer, and Co-Chief Operating Officer for the Oasis Group. He is responsible for providing legal advice to the Oasis Group and managing its legal and regulatory affairs on a global basis, as well as overseeing all non-investment aspects of the firm’s business, including infrastructure, IT and data security, business development and fund distribution, human resources, and he co-leads the firm’s finance and trade operations teams.

Mr. Meyer received a B.A. in English from The University of Texas at Austin, graduating with high honours, and he received a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was Note Editor for the Cornell International Law Journal. Mr. Meyer is licenced as an attorney with the New York State Bar and is an associate member of the Hong Kong Law Society.

He is the Chair of the Alternative Investment Management Association (AIMA) Hong Kong Executive Committee and formerly served as Co-Chair of its Regulatory Committee; serves on the Human Capital Committee of the Hong Kong Financial Services Development Council (HKFSDC); is a member of the Standards Board for Alternative Investments (SBAI) Culture & Diversity Committee for APAC; co-chairs the Sohn Hong Kong Investment Conference planning committee for the Karen Leung Foundation; formerly served as a member of the Education Committee of the Hong Kong Securities and Investment Institute (HKSI) and formerly served on the Board of Directors of the Association of Corporate Counsel Hong Kong (ACC) and as Co-Chair of its Financial Services Committee.

Mr. Meyer was named to The Legal 500’s inaugural “GC Powerlist: China & Hong Kong” in 2017 and the Oasis Legal Team was named to the GC Powerlist: Hong Kong Teams 2019, and he was the recipient of the 2021 Lexology Asia-Pacific Global Counsel Award for Regulatory (Financial Services). Mr. Meyer is a frequent speaker on topics related to financial markets, regulatory compliance, ethics, internal investigations, financial services legal issues and trends, in-house legal and compliance department management, hedge fund operations and management, shareholder activism, and ESG topics, including firm diversity and inclusion.

Thomas Deinet

Executive Director, SBAI

Thomas Deinet was appointed Executive Director of the SBAI (previously known as the HFSB) in 2008. In 2007, Thomas joined the working group to project manage the development of practice standards proposed by 14 leading international alternative investment managers that led to the establishment of the SBAI.

Prior to joining the SBAI, he was a senior manager at Oliver Wyman, where he extensively worked with major financial institutions in Europe covering asset management as well as corporate and investment banking. Thomas also worked as an analyst in energy trading for a major commodities trading firm.

Thomas is a graduate of the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, with a major in industrial engineering and holds an MSc from Purdue University, USA. Thomas is a CFA charterholder.

Carolyn J. D. Abram

Partner, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius

Carolyn J.D. Abram’s practice focuses on representing fund sponsors on the structuring, formation, and operation of private investment funds across asset classes, and other bespoke investment arrangements, including seed and stake arrangements with anchor investors, asset manager joint venture agreements, co-investment and warehousing arrangements, carried interest arrangements, secondaries transactions, and fund restructurings.

She also advises on regulatory and structural matters relating to the operations of asset managers and investment banks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and other emerging markets, particularly for global asset managers seeking to enter the MENA market.