The founder of Hanergy, a group specializing in solar panels with thin layers, was arrested by the Liaoning police on December 17, 2022, and has not been reappeared since.
by Frédéric Lemaître (Beijing, correspondent)
Li Hejun, the ex-Chinese solar panel, has disappeared. This entrepreneur, classified as the richest Chinese in 2014, was arrested by the Liaoning police on December 17, 2022, and was not reappeared since, revealed Caixin magazine on Wednesday January 11. Born in 1967, Li Hejun succeeded, at the age of 22, in borrowing 50,000 yuan (just under 7,000 euros in the current course) and, according to him, to carry out investments sufficiently judicious to be, five years later, at the head of a fortune of 80 million yuan.
In 1994, he then set his sights on energy. The investments of his company, Hanergy, in hydraulics are real success. But, in 2011, new turn. He converts Hanergy into solar panels with thin layers. Listed in Hong Kong in 2013, the company sees its value increased tenfold in two years. In 2015, the magazine Hurun, which published the list of richest Chinese, places Li Hejun at the top of its ranking, evaluating its fortune at 160 billion yuan.
However, in May of the same year, when he explains, before his shareholders, that he intends to build a larger empire than Apple, Hanergy titles collapsed by 47 % in a few tens of minutes . The rating is suspended. The company is officially excluded from the stock market four years later.
PERFUM OF CORRUPTION
is that investors and market authorities have gradually discovered that Hanergy solar panels had a single customer: the solar parks operated by company subsidiaries. Li Hejun was therefore both the seller and the buyer of his activities. Above all, it turns out that the parks mainly supplied electricity to Hanergy and almost anyone else.
According to the economic daily Jemian News, the arrest of Li Hejun could be a consequence of the setbacks of one of its main creditors, the bank of Jinzhou, an establishment located in the Liaoning, a province of the northeast of the country . This bank which, officially, had lent 10 billion yuan to Hanergy, but which, according to Caixin, was in fact much more committed to the company, had not been able to present its 2018 balance sheet due to The resignation of its listeners, the company EY.
Since then, the bank must have been recapitalized by ICBC, a large public bank, but this operation had revealed the fragility of certain regional banks and the scent of corruption that surrounds them. According to the Chinese press, more than sixty-three responsible for the Liaoning financial institutions have been arrested since 2020 in the context of anti-corruption surveys.