Low-profile Hutchison CFO breaks cover: Hutchison Whampoa has been described as Asia's savviest borrower. Jamie Ivey meets CFO Frank Sixt and discovers a man just as savvy in his dealings with the press as with the capital markets. (the CFO profile).

Frank Sixt, CFO of Hutchison Whampoa, may not like the first few paragraphs of this article. Sixt has a motto when dealing with the press--"don't personalize it."

It is easy to understand his concern. It would be simple for a journalist to write about how, following a brief telephone conversation with Sixt which carefully avoided personalizing anything, doors in corporate Hong Kong began to open. They could note that Sixt is courteous to a fault, offering to drop emails to other prospective contacts. Perhaps they might also observe how CFOs of other Asian companies begin to relax when Sixt is mentioned in conversation, as if a working relationship with Sixt is somehow a benchmark of journalistic integrity.

Sixt would no doubt call this fanciful. Perhaps it is his legal background which makes him so diffident about building up a public persona. A practising lawyer, he joined the board at Hutchison in 1991 when he found that he was beginning to participate in the business decisions of the group rather than just offering legal advice. He comments: "By the time I joined the group almost all my time was spent on their [Hutchison] projects. I had, in effect, a single client practice. Key people in the group had also become good friends, so it was a very easy transition to …