Imagine if one of Australia’s top business figures – say, retail tycoon Gerry Harvey, mega-developer Harry Triguboff, or mining billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest – was summoned to Canberra to see a furious Scott Morrison after criticizing one of his key policies.
Then, picture a reality where that extremely prominent, wealthy, and powerful figure was essentially never seen again, and their corporate assets were restricted, broken up, and siphoned off, or shut down entirely.
Just think about the uproar if a few pride-wounding words cost literally hundreds of billions of dollars.
While it sounds like something out of a dystopian novel, that exact scenario played out in China last year with the founder of one of the planet’s biggest companies.
And it took just a few minutes for Jack Ma’s world to come crashing down around him.
Less than 12 months ago, the tech pioneer was the richest man in China whose latest venture was about to launch an initial public offering worth a staggering $US37 billion ($A51 billion).
The Ant Group, the world’s largest fintech company, was a spin-off of his hugely Alibaba Group – the Amazon of China – which boasted a combined value of more than $US1 trillion ($A1.3 trillion).
But just one speech in Shanghai to a group of the country’s top business leaders in October changed all of that.
The Ant Group’s IPO was canceled. His companies have been hit with hefty penalties and forced to restructure, with new ‘partners’ instituted at senior levels by the government and a chilling process of dismantling underway.
Ma vanished from public life and speculation mounted that he was either under house arrest, hiding abroad or dead.
Several billion dollars was wiped from his personal wealth.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Technology Express staff and is published from a syndicated feed)
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