Mystery of missing execs

China Renaissance is a leading Chinese financial institution founded as an advisory firm by Bao Fan back in 2005. It offers investment banking, investment management and wealth management services, and has been listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 2018. Bao is its chair, CEO and controlling shareholder, and until very recently was regarded as one of China’s best-connected bankers, having met Alibaba’s Jack Ma, Tencent’s Pony Ma and Baidu’s Robin Li back in the 1990s and worked with them ever since.

But last Friday the company had to announce to its shocked employees that he had disappeared. At the height of the financial crisis there may well have been a constituency that would have thought that disappearing bankers was an excellent idea, but in this case the market was unimpressed. China Renaissance’s share price tanked by 50% when the market opened, later recovering to end the day a mere 28% down. The company’s president, Cong Lin, was detained by Chinese authorities in September, and the likelihood is that Bao has suffered a similar fate.

There has been a long list of executive disappearances since President Xi Jinping launched his anticorruption campaign back in 2012, while over in Mother Russia at least 12 elite businessmen have died, apparently by suicide or in unexplained circumstances, since the launch of hostilities in Ukraine. It seems a remarkable coincidence that executives who criticise the war keep tumbling out of hotel windows, and it might be a sensible strategy for anybody considering an opinion on the topic to stick to the ground floor.