Chinese executive’s arrest for murder weighs on share of Sunflower Pharmaceutical
- Sunflower Pharmaceutical saw shares drop 10 per cent in 12 minutes over reports of arrest
- Company tells stock exchange its operations are not affected
A large pharmaceutical company in northeast China’s Heilongjiang province scrambled to do damage control after news its former chairman and controlling shareholder had been arrested on murder changes sent its share price into a tailspin.
Sunflower Pharmaceutical Group issued a response to an inquiry by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange saying operations are not affected by the arrest. Its stock plummeted 10 per cent – that daily limit in China – in just 12 minutes on Wednesday. The company’s shares were trading down for nearly all of Thursday, closing at a loss of 1.4 per cent.
The story caught fire on China’s exuberant internet community, prodded by a report citing unnamed sources Wednesday in state-run ThePaper.cn’s report that Guan Yanbin, who left his post last year, was arrested for allegedly killing his wife. Beijing News also reported Guan was accused of killing his wife, citing a source in the local prosecutor’s office with saying she had been beaten into a “vegetable.”
A police microblog on Wednesday confirmed the arrest on murder charges, without details on the victim.
In its response to the exchange, Sunflower said the case was still under investigation and only concerned Guan’s families, and company management as well as business operations were in order and stable. The statement also said that Sunflower’s 2018 annual report that was released in March had a section highlighting that Guan was taken into judicial control because of causing a bodily injury to someone in a personal spat.
