Jack Ma made a single public statement after annoying the Chinese government in a scathing speech last October, postponing Ant Group’s record b 37bn initial public offering fur.
But the Financial Times has obtained details of his private jet flight, which suggests that – the year-old Chinese billionaire is down, he is far away.
The radarbox, the flight lugs associated with the flight tracking company’s data, also dispels rumors that he has fled from China to Singapore or is under house arrest. Instead, they suggest that Mae must continue to access his Gulfstream jet, which has a range that could easily take him to New York or London.
Mani sits at a private terminal in the Gulfstream Hangzhou, the headquarters of the companies he founded, Alibaba and the Ant Group. The jet’s travel schedule identified by the FT matched the more than a dozen public appearances Mae made in the three months before Mae got into trouble with officials.
Records of other private jets registered in China or the Cayman Islands, a popular destination for Chinese billionaires to register their aircraft, are similar travel routes, according to data from RadarBox.
Flight lugs, Ma’s busy schedule shows a dramatic slowdown after she started low. Before October, Maa traveled an average of once every three days. In January and February he only went once a week, mainly to Beijing and the tropical island resort of Hainan, where Bloomberg reported he was seen playing golf.
Still, it seems that when Chinese regulators wanted to talk about ants, it was Ma who flew to Beijing. It is the controlling shareholder of the payment group but does not have a formal formal status.
Ants and people close to Alibaba and regulators in Beijing confirmed that he was directly involved in negotiations over Antony’s future. A person close to the regulators complained that Ma was still going over his head so that he could pursue the case with the top leaders of the Communist Party. A friend of Ma’s agreed. “It still has the potential to reach the very top,” the person said.
Records show intense activity around the controversial October speech in Shanghai, in which he criticized state-owned banks and regulators. The next day she made this comment, her jet went to Beijing for a four day stay.
A few days later, on November 1, at 9 pm, Ma went to Beijing again from her hometown, Hangzhou. Chinese regulators immediately announced that they had called him for grilling and Ant will have to face new rules that effectively targeted his IPO. Ma’s jet parked in Beijing for two weeks.
The flight to its next capital came on Christmas Day, after which China’s financial regulators publicly called the Ant Group for another discussion on “financial oversight, fair competition and consumer protection.”
In late January, his jet returned to Beijing as ants and regulators undertook a restructuring plan, which was agreed upon, but not made public.
In contrast, data from a flight before October October depicts a billionaire who cross-crossed China to collect rewards and Hobnob with local officials.
At the end of August Gust, Ma’s plane flew to Beijing where he received an award from the Jordanian government for helping him cope with the Covid-19. “The virus doesn’t have a passport, or they don’t need a visa,” Ma told a crowd of diplomats at the country’s embassy. A few days later he was in the air again, moving to Kunming when he opened a new campus for his business school.
He and his plane were then spotted in a branch by the lake, before returning to Hangzhou for another speech to open the school year.
On September 9, Ma landed in Chongqing where she ate kebabs on sticks and drank beer until late at night. He then went to Changsha and Fuzhou for a meeting with local officials before treating himself Restructuring, The famous hot, dry noodles in Wuhan. He took a month off by lecturing in haiku.
“My judgment about the future: it will be difficult in the short term, even more difficult in the medium term, but in the long run it will be good,” Mae told a crowd of businessmen. “Now is the turbulent period when the plane passes through the clouds, so everyone must hold the steering wheel and fasten the seat belt.”
Alibaba mentioned the basic questions of Mana Charitable, which did not respond to a request for comment. The ant group did not respond to a request for comment.
Nian Liu contributed to the reporting from Beijing
