In the midst of the disappearance of Chinese Billionaire Jack Ma from public view in the wake of censuring China’s regulators and state-run banks, now the Chinese government is considering nationalisation of Jack Ma’s Alibaba and the Ant Group.
Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group who has a net worth of $60 billion has been named as a “money-grabbing vampire who exploits the poor”, by Chinese state outlets.
In November 2020, the Wall Street Journal announced that Chinese President Xi Jinping by personally scuttled Ant Group’s $37 billion initial public offerings.
Jack Ma, is said to have procured the rage of Chinese leadership for dispatching a public attack on the financial watchdogs, regulatory landscape, and state-owned banks.
During an address he conveyed at Bund Summit in Shanghai on 24 Oct 2020, Ma reprimanded the regulatory system for stifling innovation and called for a new set of regulatory reform to fuel growth.
The discourse is said to have enraged Chinese authority and set off a chain of occasions that torpedoed the listing of Ant.
Not long after Ma’s searing attack on the regulatory constraints, state regulators started aggregating reports remembering one for how Ant had utilized digital financial products like Huabei, a virtual credit card service, to encourage poor and young people to build up debt.