When China Serves Lemons, Singapore Makes Lemonade
How to avoid a sour taste after a stock collapse.
China Fibretech’s independent directors were enterprising enough to seek and get a white knight.
Photograph: oksix/iStockphoto/Getty Images
First the stock fell 90 percent. Then it stopped trading altogether. That was two and a half years ago. In November, hapless shareholders got the firm’s annual report… for 2015. And even that came with an auditor’s note that $69 million of cash the management said was in Chinese bank accounts couldn’t be verified.
When I wrote about China Fibretech Ltd. in April last year, the Singapore exchange had just filed complaints with Chinese authorities against Wu Xinhua, executive chairman and CEO of the Fujian province-based fabric dyer, in relation to “several alleged offenses under the Chinese Penal Code.” The update to that unhappy saga is that it may have a happy ending after all.