Two months after being expelled from the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Chinese businessman Wang Jing stepped out of the shadows to congratulate Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, for his questioned reelection in the presidency of Nicaragua. Country where it promised in 2013 to build an interoceanic canal, at an initial cost of 40 billion dollars, which would later go up to 50 billion and finally it was not materialized.
However, Wang said Thursday in a public letter to Ortega that the company Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co .; Ltd. (also known as HKND Group) and he, still youThey have “faith in the grand canal project” in Nicaragua.
“The HKND Group and I firmly believe that under the leadership of President Daniel Ortega, Vice President Rosario Murillo, and Comrade Laureano Ortega, the Nicaraguan people will continue to promote social progress and economic development in Nicaragua, overcoming all difficulties along the way. The great Nicaraguan people and the great Chinese people will deepen the reestablishment of the fraternal historical friendship between the two and Nicaragua will surely become an indispensable pivot along the strip and the route, “wrote the Chinese businessman.
Last September, Wang and his company Beijing Xinwei Technology Group Co., Ltd. (also known as Xinwei Group), were forced out of the Chinese stock market for ten years. After the sanctions were imposed, the assets of the Xinwei Group fell into negative territory, constituting a debt of 2.3 billion dollars “and created a significant financial turmoil for more than 100,000 of its shareholders,” reads an article published by The Epoch Times, a New York-based international outlet that publishes news from China.
Millionaire losses in the Stock Market
It was not the first time that Wang’s foray into the Stock Market resulted in a multimillion-dollar loss of resources.
In October 2015, following a crash in the Chinese stock market, the businessman’s fortune declined by 9,100 million dollars, by losing 89.2% of the 10.2 billion dollars it had accumulated.
While continuing its erratic behavior on the stock market, on June 26, 2017, the company delivered dividends of 0.009 renminbi per share. Renminbi, or ‘people’s money’, is the name of the Chinese currency, although in the rest of the world it is known as the yuan. In June 2017, a yuan was trading at 15 cents, according to information available online, meaning that $ 0.00135 (less than one-seventh of a penny) was paid per share.
At the beginning of the second half of 2019, and after falling for 36 consecutive days, the Xinwei Group was delisted from the stock market, after more than 900 days of being suspended, after setting a record of consecutive falls of ‘A’ shares, where I know they evaporated almost $ 29.5 billion, affecting more than 150,000 shareholders.
In March 2020, when the Asian had already disappeared from the Nicaraguan horizon, the markets echoed another debacle of Wang Jing’s businesses, when the value of its shares fell by 45.8%, thus reducing his nominal fortune even further.
Canal concession is still in force
At the end of September the news about the eviction of Wang from the Shanghai Stock Exchange It generated certain expectations that Ortega would finally cancel the canal concession, which he granted in 2013 to the Chinese magnate for a period of one hundred years.
The approval of the canal law, with its threat of expropriating as much property as necessary – even if it was outside the area granted in concession – generated a wave of disagreement that especially hit the peasant sectors, when it verified that there was a risk of uprooting, point that they organized around a hundred marches against the initiative promoted by Ortega.
Although the concession is still in force, the director of the National Council in Defense of Our Land, Lake and Sovereignty, Nemesio Mejía, ruled out that it has any use, because “it has no strength, especially when you have a dismantled country, a disrupted economy and an international community that no longer recognizes Daniel Ortega’s projects ”.
