Where is Jack Ma, the richest man in China?

Shanghai / Beijing – The founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba and China’s richest man thanks to his $ 65.6 billion fortune, Jack Ma, has not appeared in public since late October 2020, weeks in which it has deteriorated the relationship between Beijing and the conglomerate it created.

In recent weeks, the international press has speculated on Ma’s whereabouts – using the term “missing” – while Chinese official media maintain a coordinated silence that coincides with reports of Beijing’s alleged orders not to give media coverage to the investigation. antitrust recently opened against Alibaba.

However, Sources familiar with the situation told Efe today that Ma is trying to keep a “low profile” and that “he is fine”, at the same time as they described the rumors that he has been arrested or that the authorities have banned him from leaving the country. of “unfounded.”

In November, Ma did not take part in the jury for the television program he founded, “Business Heroes in Africa,” and was replaced by another Alibaba executive, which set off these alarms. its apparent frictions with the Chinese Government in recent times.

Persistent speculation

In recent years, some of the best-known figures in China have “disappeared” after committing crimes or arguing with the authorities and then reappearing months later, such as the popular actress Fan Bingbing, who is not known. he knew nothing for several months in 2018 after a tax evasion case.

However, Ma seems to be trying not to cause more commotion in the face of the tough hand of Beijing, which in November forced the suspension of the IPO of Ma’s technofinance (‘fintech’), Ant Group, which was to be the largest such operation in history.

In any case, Ma, a public figure who does not shy away from cameras or microphones – He recorded his own kung-fu film and appeared on stage imitating Michael Jackson during a corporate event – has not wanted get out of the way of rumors, and neither have Alibaba nor Ant officially.

What the two firms have done is issue several communiqués in which they assure that their operations remain normal and that they will collaborate with the authorities.

It should be remembered that Ma left the presidency of Alibaba in 2019 -20 years after its founding- and that he has no executive position in Ant, although he is a majority shareholder in it.

Meanwhile, on Chinese social media like the popular Weibo, equivalent to Twitter, his vast legion of followers are asking the entrepreneur, popularly known as “Professor Ma” for his professional past in teaching English, to give some clue of his whereabouts, while his detractors call him an unscrupulous “capitalist” and say he “will be punished.”

And in the Baidu search engine – equivalent to Google – the predictions when typing Ma Yun (his name in Chinese) go through “Jack Ma went into exile”, “Jack Ma sentenced to prison” or “Jack Ma, missing”, which shows that speculation is persistent among the citizens of Asian country.

Criticisms and attempts to calm the waters

Just before Ant’s IPO failed, Ma raised great controversy in China by delivering a speech in which he harshly criticized China’s strategy of minimizing risks in the financial sector, assuring that “innovation it always comes with risks ”and that“ the biggest risk is when you try to minimize the risk to zero ”.

The richest man in China, who is also a member of the Communist Party (CCP), reserved some bullets then against traditional banks, which he claimed are run as “pawnshops” to defend the need of alternative financing channels such as those offered by Ant through its Alipay platform.

Days later, Chinese regulators called in Ma and Ant’s executives and issued much more restrictive new regulations for ‘fintechs’, leading some experts to speculate that the employer already knew the content of this new regulation and was trying to force a renegotiation of its terms through public criticism, something not overly common in such a high-profile figure in China.

In recent weeks, both the state press and senior officials of regulatory bodies have criticized these funding channels, assuring that financial innovation is a “double-edged sword” and that some of the companies in the sector, without pointing directly to Ant , operate “in violation of regulations under the banner of innovation, causing enormous financial and social risks.”

Faced with the onslaught of Beijing, Ant decided to lower credit limits to younger users of its Huabei and Ma virtual card service, according to the US newspaper The Wall Street Journal, and would have offered the authorities to take control of any of the company’s platforms “whenever the country needs them”.