Wednesday, May 20, 2015

UPDATED--World's Largest Solar Co's Stock Suspended After 47% Plunge

Update below.
Original post:

Score one for the Financial Times.

March 25, 2015
Stock Manipulation In the World's Largest Solar Company 
Alternate headline: "How to Do Business Journalism."
Seriously.
If the writers were US based, this reporting would be up for a Pulitzer....
March 26, 2015
Follow-up To "Stock Manipulation In the World's Largest Solar Company"

"...Hanergy: stock manipulation claims are mere 'innuendo'..."
...The FT story, being the FT, actually left open the complex-chaotic system possibility of  something akin to spontaneous chaotic granular mixing:*
....The FT examined 140m individual trades from top listed companies in Hong Kong to explore the soaring share price of what until last year was a little known small-cap solar company. 

Nothing within the data explains why the HTF surge happens. But analysts, who examined the FT findings, as well as the raw data, laid out three possible scenarios: market manipulation by an unknown trader, an algorithmic trading program is at play, or it occurs randomly....
* "There are several types of instabilities in fluid mechanics that lead to spontaneous chaotic mixing and intricate patterns. Classical examples include the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability1, 2 in shear layers, the instability of Taylor–Couette flow between rotating cylinders3, 4 and the Rayleigh-Bénard instability in thermal convection5. More recently, a variety of two- and three-dimensional chaotic mixing phenomena have been observed in other geometries6, 7, 8, 9...."
-Nature,  Nature 397, 675-678 (25 February 1999)
May 20, 2015
Hanergy shares suspended after 47% plunge
 
Shares in Hanergy Thin Film Power plunged 47 per cent before they were suspended in Hong Kong after the Chinese solar equipment supplier’s chairman missed the company’s annual meeting.

After a vicious reversal of a share price surge which had made chairman Li Hejun one of the richest men in China, HTF’s shares were halted on Wednesday at HK$3.91, having opened at HK$7.32. The suspension was requested by Hanergy pending an announcement. No other information was given.
HTF’s public relations company confirmed that Mr Li, who is the group’s majority shareholder, did not attend Wednesday’s annual meeting in Hong Kong, although other senior executives, including Frank Dai Mingfang, chief executive, and Eddie Lam, finance director, were present.

David Webb, a corporate governance activist in Hong Kong, said it was unusual, but not unknown, for chairmen to miss AGMs. “It’s a positive thing if a chairman does attend given he probably has the deciding vote on the date of the AGM in the first place,” he said.

TL Chow, an external spokesman for Hanergy, confirmed Mr Li did not attend, adding: “He had something to do”....MUCH MORE
Update:
FT Alphaville, naturally enough, has a post on Hanergy which I had not gotten to when posting the above:
 (confession: yes, I sometimes read the paper before the flagship blog)
“He had something to do”
in which Dan McCrum points to an earlier article which is spongeworthy worth a reiteration:
Breakneck growth of Hanergy raises questions - FT.com