Was Yang arrested?
Landing International Development shares plunged almost 30 percent on October 2, recovered somewhat on October 3, and remained generally unstable amid questions about Chairman Yang Zhihui, who dropped out of sight in August and remains missing.
As the stock value seesawed, Landing, the operator of an integrated resort on Jeju Island in South Korea, told the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that it could not account for the decline and had no information about Yang, whose whereabouts are still unknown.
Yang was last seen on August 7 at a groundbreaking ceremony for the company’s proposed $1.5 billion integrated resort in Manila’s Entertainment City. The day of the ceremony, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte pulled the plug on the project and fired the entire board of Landing’s Philippine partner on the project, alleging that it was party to a back-door land deal. Duterte then declared that no new casinos would be built in the Philippines during his administration.
According to Casino.org, there is speculation that Yang was detained in Phnom Penh “for bribery” on or around August 22 and later extradited to China, where he was wanted for questioning over his business with the state-owned Huarong International Financial Holdings. Huarong Chairman Lai Xiaomin resigned in April amid corruption allegations.
Investors began selling off Landing shares after Duterte cancelled the NayonLanding project in Entertainment City. Later in August, when news emerged about the chairman’s disappearance, Landing stock plunged 35 percent in just two hours and the company was forced to suspend trading.
Also according to Casino.org, just before the latest crash, the Hong Kong government Gazette reported that the territory’s securities regulator had frozen $1.3 billion in assets of an unnamed chairman of a public company who is suspected of fraud, the largest amount ever frozen by regulators there. Though the regulator did not identify the company in question, it did acknowledge that the company has lost contact with its chairman possibly due to corruption charges.
While all the indicators seem to point to Yang, Bloomberg News reported that “at least” two other chairmen have gone missing from Hong Kong-listed Chinese firms in 2018, all of whom may have been caught up in Beijing’s ongoing anti-graft crackdown.
Yang owns a company that owns 50.48 percent of Landing International, which opened a foreigners-only casino at its Jeju Shinhwa World resort on the South Korean island of Jeju in February.
