The New York Times
The Ping An International Finance Center, being built in Shenzhen. Ping An is among the world’s biggest financial institutions.
SHANGHAI — Relatives of a top Chinese regulator profited enormously from the purchase of shares in a once-struggling insurance company that is now one of China’s biggest financial powerhouses, according to interviews and a review of regulatory filings.
The regulator, Dai Xianglong, was the head of China’s central bank and also had oversight of the insurance industry in 2002, when a company his relatives helped control bought a big stake in Ping An Insurance that years later came to be worth billions of dollars. The insurer was drawing new investors ahead of a public stock offering after averting insolvency a few years earlier.
With growing attention on the wealth amassed by families of the politically powerful in China, the investments of Mr. Dai’s relatives illustrate that the riches extend beyond the families of the political elites to the families of regulators with control of the country’s most important business and financial levers. Mr. Dai, an economist, has since left his post with the central bank and now manages the country’s $150 billion social security fund, one of the world’s biggest investment funds.
How much the relatives made in the deal is not known, but analysts say the activity raises further doubts about whether the capital markets are sufficiently regulated in China.
Nicholas C. Howson, an expert in Chinese securities law at the University of Michigan Law School, said: “While not per se illegal or even evidence of corruption, these transactions feed into a problematic perception that is widespread in the P.R.C.: the relatives of China’s highest officials are given privileged access to pre-I.P.O. properties.” He was using the abbreviation for China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.
The company that bought the Ping An stake was controlled by a group of investment firms, including two set up by Mr. Dai’s son-in-law, Che Feng, as well as other firms associated with Mr. Che’s relatives and business associates, the regulatory filings show.
The company, Dinghe Venture Capital, got the shares for an extremely good price, the records show, paying a small fraction of what a large British bank had paid per share just two months earlier. The company paid $55 million for its Ping An shares on Dec. 26, 2002. By 2007, the last time the value of the investment was made public, the shares were worth $3.1 billion.
In its investigation, The New York Times found no indication that Mr. Dai had been aware of his relatives’ activities, or that any law had been broken. But the relatives appeared to have made a fortune by investing in financial services companies over which Mr. Dai had regulatory authority.
In another instance, in November 2002, Dinghe acquired a big stake in Haitong Securities, a brokerage firm that also fell under Mr. Dai’s jurisdiction, according to the brokerage firm’s Shanghai prospectus.
By 2007, just after Haitong’s public listing in Shanghai, those shares were worth about $1 billion, according to public filings. Later, between 2007 and 2010, Mr. Dai’s wife, Ke Yongzhen, was chairwoman on Haitong’s board of supervisors.
A spokesman for Mr. Dai and the National Social Security Fund did not return phone calls seeking comment. A spokeswoman for Mr. Che, the son-in-law, denied by e-mail that he had ever held a stake in Ping An. The spokeswoman said another businessman had bought the Ping An shares and then, facing financial difficulties, sold them to a group that included Mr. Che’s friends and relatives, but not Mr. Che.
The businessman “could not afford what he has created, so he had to sell his shares all at once,” the spokeswoman, Jenny Lau, wrote in an e-mail.
The corporate records reviewed by The Times, however, show that Mr. Che, his relatives and longtime business associates set up a complex web of companies that effectively gave him and the others control of Dinghe Venture Capital, which made the investments in Ping An and Haitong Securities. The records show that one of the companies later nominated Mr. Che to serve on the Ping An board of supervisors. His term ran from 2006 to 2009.
The Times reported last month that another investment company had also bought shares in Ping An Insurance at an unusually low price on the same day in 2002 as Dinghe Venture Capital. That company, Tianjin Taihong, was later partly controlled by relatives of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, then serving as vice premier with oversight of China’s financial institutions. In late 2007, the shares Taihong bought in Ping An were valued at $3.7 billion.
The investments by Dinghe and Taihong are significant in part because by late 2002, Beijing regulators had granted Ping An an unusual waiver to rules that would have forced the insurer to sell off some divisions. Throughout the late 1990s, the company was fighting rules that would have required a breakup, a move that Ping An executives worried could lead to bankruptcy.
It is unclear whether Mr. Wen or Mr. Dai intervened on behalf of Ping An, but in April 2002 the company was allowed to reorganize and retain its brokerage and trust division. Two years later, Ping An sold shares to the public for the first time in Hong Kong. In 2007, after a second stock listing in Shanghai, the value of the company’s shares skyrocketed. Today, Ping An is one of the world’s biggest financial institutions, worth an estimated $65 billion.
The decision to grant the waiver came after Ping An executives and the insurer’s bankers had aggressively lobbied regulators, including Mr. Dai.
