Fosun’s Guo urges investors to make rumourmongers pay, in a WeChat post from Sao Paolo

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Celine Ge

Published: 1:55pm, 24 Jul 2017Updated: 11:00pm, 24 Jul 2017

Guo Guangchang, the founder and chairman of one of China’s biggest asset buyers, has urged his company’s shareholders and investors to take action against rumourmongers whose falsehoods destroy stock market value and hurt their financial interests.

“While we’re been busy working, some people were busy spreading rumours, because that’s their occupation,” Guo said in a July 22 memo to staff, sent via the WeChat social network from Sao Paolo in Brazil. “They’re actively spreading rumours because the cost of doing so is very low, while the financial returns are very high.”

Guo would know. On July 6, the share prices of Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group Co., the flagship drug maker of his sprawling Fosun Group -- with businesses from property to financial services -- plunged on the Shanghai and Hong Kong bourses, after word spread that the 50-year-old entrepreneur was unreachable.

Being unreachable is a frequently used euphemism in China, when high officials and sometimes the chiefs of state-owned companies, would be detained without notification for investigations.

Guo was indeed unreachable on July 6, but not for the insinuated reasons. He had been stuck in Xi’an by a delayed commercial flight to Shanghai -- his Fosun business jet was under maintenance -- where he had been delivering a speech, he said in an interview that day with the South China Morning Post , and according to his remarks in a phone conference organised by UBS.

The origin of the rumour was apparently a December 2015 news report about Guo, who’d been unreachable then while he was cooperating with Chinese investigators with probes into the country’s stock market rout that had broken out five months earlier.