Where is Jack Ma? Alibaba's billionaire founder hasn't been seen publicly in 2 months following China's crackdowns on his companies
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Jack Ma, the 56-year-old billionaire founder of Alibaba and Ant Group, hasn't been seen publicly in more than two months, Jessica Yun reported for Yahoo Finance on Sunday.
Ma has been in the spotlight recently as China has cracked down on his business empire. In late December, Chinese regulators launched an antitrust investigation into Alibaba, the country's biggest e-commerce company, sometimes referred to as "the Amazon of China." And in November, China introduced regulations that halted what would have been a massive initial public offering for Ant Group, Ma's fintech company.
The new rules came weeks after Ma criticized China's financial regulatory system at a conference in Shanghai. Ma reportedly dismissed the global financial regulations used by China as "an old people's club" and said that "we can't use yesterday's methods to regulate the future."In November, Ma was replaced as a judge on the African talent show he founded, "Africa's Business Heroes," the Financial Times reported. The talent show did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment, but an Alibaba representative said Ma could no longer be on the judging panel for the show's finale, which was filmed in November but has not yet been released," due to a scheduling conflict."
"We do not have anything to add beyond that," the representative said in response to questions about Ma's whereabouts.Ma stepped down as Alibaba's chairman in 2019.
In a video interview in August 2019, Guo Wengui, who fled China as a fugitive in 2014 and has described himself as a whistleblower exposing corruption in the country, said Ma would likely end up in jail or dead in the next year because China wanted to "take back" Ma's lucrative Ant Group.
Last week, the Chinese government ordered Ant Group, which owns Alipay, China's largest digital-payment platform, to scale back its operations after expressing concerns that its corporate governance was "not sound."
A representative for Ant Group did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment for this story.Copyright © 2021. Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved.For reprint rights. Times Syndication Service.
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