Shanghai’s police force has started an investigation into two online platforms after receiving reports from investors that they had been involved in “illegal fundraising,” the city’s Public Security Bureau said.
Jinlu Fund (金鹿財行) and Dangtian Caifu (當天財富) had promised investors a fixed yield of about 10 percent without obtaining proper legal permission, according to a statement released on the bureau’s official microblogging account on Tuesday.
The police have taken “restrictive measures” in connection with the case and will try to recover as much of the assets as possible, the bureau said.
Shanghai Kuailu Investment Group (上海快鹿), which announced in April the acquisition of the two platforms, will be urged to “take corporate responsibility,” according to the statement, which did not give further details.
The Web sites of Jinlu Fund, Dangtian Caifu and Shanghai Kuailu were inaccessible and appeared to be down. A WeChat message to a Kuailu public relations person was not returned.
Before the takeover, Jinlu on March 31 said that it suspended payments on some wealth-management products jointly created with Kuailu, because of a 300 million yuan (US$45 million) cash shortage.
Kuailu committed at least 3 billion yuan of assets as collateral for the delayed payment at the time.
Chinese authorities have increased their scrutiny of the loosely regulated online-lending industry after a series of defaults and cases of fraud. In December last year, the country’s biggest Ponzi scheme was exposed after Internet lender Ezubo (e-租寶) allegedly defrauded more than 900,000 people out of the equivalent of US$7.6 billion. The nation has 1,778 “problematic” online lenders, figures from the China Banking Regulatory Commission showed.
The regulator last month imposed limits on lending by peer-to-peer platforms to individuals and companies. The lenders were also barred from taking public deposits or selling wealth-management products, and must appoint qualified banks as custodians and improve information disclosure.
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