Search Continues for star banker in China

Charlie, the disappearance of the bank has prompted several state-run banks with exposure to its company to ask for more information about the situation. Could you share a bit more on this? Yes, we are hearing from people familiar with the matter that several state lenders, including Development Bank of Pudong, City Bank, Communications Bank, and also China Emotions Bank, are reaching out to China Renaissance for more clarity of the situation since the mysterious disappearance of the banker. They are also reaching out to their own government contacts for more information about him and about the company. And also we heard China Renaissance capital has been in touch with those banks but hasn't received any request to make any immediate repayment of the loans. Because the banks have about a total of 2.3 billion yuan in exposure to the company. They need to assess the risk of the exposure for sure.

Yeah, that's basically what we are hearing. Charlie, what does this all tell us about the latest China's regulation in business environment and indeed Xi Jinping's crackdown on corruption in financial services? Yeah, it just shows how opaque the country's regulatory and business environment system is. As you mentioned, the banks themselves are backed by the state. They are supposed to have a lot of access to information like this. But everybody seems to be left in the dark. And if you still remember last Thursday when the company said they have lost touch with the banker, Baofan, the investors reacted by dumping the shares and sending the stock prices down nearly 30% the next day. So in China, when a public company says it has lost touch with one of its executives, usually means the official, the executive is in assisting a graft probe or is implicated in a scandal or things like that.

So in this situation, we are not sure what's happened to Baofan. Although we heard from a person familiar with the matter that from his family that he's assisting a probe. And we are also at this stage where it's unclear whether this marks any escalation of Xi Jinping's corruption campaign in the financial industry. If you still remember, dozens of senior executives and officials have been probed and arrested in the past few years amid the crackdown, including a few senior executives from the investment banking industry. Baofan is a high profile and he is a top broker for many tech deals, raising a lot of money for a lot of big tech Chinese companies. So everybody is watching this very closely.

Banking, Charlie Zhu, China, Fan Bao, Haslinda Amin, Rishaad Salamat, State-Owned Assets, company news, missing