Alibaba founder Jack Ma ends up in Japan after China crackdown

LONDON: Top Chinese billionaire Jack Ma and founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, has been living in central Tokyo for almost six months, according to a report by the British daily Financial Times.

Ma, who was once the richest business leader in China, shifted to neighbouring Japan, amid the Chinese government's crackdown on the country's technology sector and its most powerful businessmen, the report adds.

Ma vanished from the public eye after he slammed Beijing Chinese regulators in 2020, accusing the state banks of having a "pawnshop mentality".

He even called for the introduction of bold new players that could extend China's credit to the collateral poor. After the criticism, Ma's Ant group and e-commerce giant Alibaba faced a series of regulatory hurdles.

According to the Financial Times report, Chinese regulators called off Ant's blockbuster USD 37 billion initial public offering and fined Alibaba a record USD 2.8 billion for antitrust abuses last year.

In another report titled "CCP's intimidating tactics against Technocrats and Big Businesses in China", another publication Financial Post, said that the Chinese communist party in their quest to intimidate large-scale businesses and their founders. The party-cum-state, has begun its long-awaited crackdown on big businesses that refused to endorse the Party's repressive policies, the report adds.

It says the situation of Jack Ma is telling of the CCP's tactics of intimidation through coercive means. According to the report, this has invariably caused fear amongst other business owners that had previously raised similar concerns.

Pursuing the same method, China recently initiated a revision of Chinese law deeming certain practices deployed by large platforms such as Alibaba, Tencent, amongst others as illegal.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is reportedly in the process of imposing a USD 1 billion penalty on the degraded Chinese firm, making it the largest regulatory fine to ever be imposed, according to Financial Post.