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Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, the founding father of Alibaba and Ant Group, is suspected lacking, Jessica Yun reported for Yahoo Finance.
The 56-year-old businessman has not been seen in public for greater than two months, per the report.
Ma has been within the highlight just lately as China has cracked down on his enterprise empire. In late December, Chinese regulators launched an antitrust investigation into Alibaba, the nation’s greatest e-commerce firm that some discuss with as “the Amazon of China.” And in November, China had launched a collection of latest rules that put a halt to what would have been the huge preliminary public providing of Ma’s fintech firm, Ant Group.
The new guidelines got here weeks after Ma criticized China’s monetary regulatory system at a convention in Shanghai in October. At the convention, Ma reportedly dismissed the worldwide monetary rules utilized by China as “an old people’s club” and mentioned, “We can’t use yesterday’s methods to regulate the future.”
Blair Silverberg, CEO of debt-financing startup Capital instructed Business Insider’s Katie Canales in November that the brand new rules had been launched “so the government can assert its supremacy over Jack Ma.”
In November, Ma was changed as a choose on the African expertise present he based, “Africa’s Business Heroes,” the Financial Times reported. The expertise present didn’t instantly reply to Business Insider’s request for remark, however an Alibaba spokesperson instructed Business that Ma might now not be on the judging panel for the present’s finale – which was filmed in November however has not but been launched – “due to a scheduling conflict.”
“We do not have anything to add beyond that,” the spokesperson mentioned in response to questions on Ma’s whereabouts.
Ma stepped down as chairman of Alibaba in 2019.
Until just lately, Ma was China’s richest man with a fortune that reached greater than $60 billion. Ma’s web price has nonetheless taken a $12 billion hit over the previous two months as China has tightened guidelines for the monetary expertise trade. Today, Ma is price $50.6 billion, making him the fourth-richest particular person in China, in keeping with the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
As information of Ma’s suspected disappearance has unfold, an August 2019 prediction about Ma by one other billionaire Chinese businessman has been recirculating on social media.
In the video interview, Guo Wengui, who fled China as a fugitive in 2014 and claims to be a whistleblower exposing corruption within the nation, mentioned that within the subsequent 12 months, Ma would doubtless find yourself in jail or useless as a result of China desires to “take back” Ma’s profitable Ant Group.
Last week, the Chinese authorities ordered Ant Group, which owns China’s largest digital cost platform Alipay, to cut back its operations after expressing considerations that its company governance was “not sound.”
A spokesperson for Ant Group didn’t instantly reply to Business Insider’s request for remark for this story.
Read the unique article on Business Insider
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