Caixin’s investigation of CEFC and Chairman Ye Jianming

Chairman Ye Jianming, photographed by Caixin

On March 1, Caixin broke the news that Chairman Ye Jianming of the China CEFC Energy Co. has been detained by PRC authorities, and is under investigation for suspected criminal activity.

The company initially tried to refute this as “irresponsible” reporting, but investors opted to believe China’s leading investigative journalism outlet, and the company’s bonds dropped by 33% in a day.

But the party-state authorities’ ban on reporting about Chairman Ye and his empire of enterprise (documented here in 2017) remains in place, so Caixin‘s scoop was expunged from the PRC internet within hours.

The news was officially confirmed more than two weeks later, on March 19, when the Czech Republic sent a delegation to find out what was going on with its major source of foreign investment. The delegation was told that Chairman Ye, an advisor to Czech President Milos Zeman, was indeed “being investigated for a suspicion of breaking the law.”

CEFC was ranked 222nd in the Fortune 500 in 2017, and last year stunned the international energy industry by securing agreement to buy a $9 billion, 15% stake in Rosneft, Russia’s state oil giant.

Now the company’s future is as murky as its past.

Caixin reporter Ji Tianqin 季天琴 spent the most of 2017 interviewing CEFC executives, tracking down former associates of Ye, and tracing CEFC’s constellation of satellite companies through the financial records. And the crowning glory: she interviewed Ye himself twice, finding all manner of holes in the stories he told her.

Ji Tianqin is famous in Chinese journalism circles for her award-winning deep-dives addressing, among other things, Wang Lijun’s reign of terror in Chongqing. Considering the difficulty of being an investigative reporter in China today, she really ought to be famous outside China too.

This epic investigation into CEFC reveals how, through party and military connections, turnover figures massively inflated by fake trading, and relentless pursuit of international photo-ops and status symbols, Ye Jianming was able to sell domestic and foreign audiences a mostly vacuous narrative about his rising global energy and finance colossus.

Suffice to say, these revelations extend my record of getting some things right about CEFC, but not very many. I’ll leave that discussion for another post, as my purpose here is to urge China-watchers to invest the time in dipping into the 16,000-word translation below — and to please share thoughts on what it all means. I’d also welcome any translation corrections from people more familiar with financial and business terminology.

This is a spectacular work of Chinese investigative journalism that may contain some profound implications for understanding the PRC’s economy, politics and international relations. 

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Ye Jianming under investigation, what fate will befall CEFC?
叶简明被调查中国华信命运如何？

Caixin Online

By Ji Tianqin

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