China's largest-ever stock price manipulation trial involving some 5.4 billion yuan (US$653 million) has opened in Beijing, court officials said yesterday.
"The trial is ongoing and is expected to continue for another day," an official at Beijing's No. 2 Intermediate People's Court said.
"We don't know if a verdict will be handed down tomorrow or not," he said.
The trial of seven people centers on the China Venture Capital company which raised funds from more than 100 other companies and individuals between December 1998 and January of last year in an effort to manipulate the price of an affiliated listed company.
The funds were placed in over 1,500 stock accounts nationwide and used to manipulate the share price of the listed company Shenzhen Kangdaer, a chicken breeding and feed company, the Beijing Times reported. Shenzhen Kangdaer's share price rose from 17 yuan in late 1998 to over 80 yuan a share in February 2000.
The scam was uncovered early last year, but the two main suspects Lu Jianxin (also known as Lu Liang), former head of the Beijing Yanyuan Investment Corp, and Zhu Huanliang, former head of Shenzhen Yingtetai stock trading company, have gone missing.
Lu was a consultant for China Venture Capital and had designed a rescue package for the ailing company, which included the stock price manipulation scheme, the paper said. Lu outlined parts of the scheme in a series of media interviews given in late 2000 and early last year.
The case is expected to result in new stock trading regulations being introduced by the China Securities Regulatory Commission. It is also likely to expose some of the complicated networks that have developed in the murky world of Chinese stock transactions, press reports said.
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