Sports students are involved in finance. In their freshman year, they drive a Porsche and wear a Rolex to intern at CITIC Securities, where they can participate in three IPO projects right after starting the internship. These are not the most ironic parts.
To put it bluntly, these are all trivial matters.
The real irony is that CITIC Securities actually ranked first in the securities company quality evaluation published by the North Exchange.
You see, in the past five years, the companies sponsored for listing by CITIC Securities have always been the hardest hit areas for financial fraud and abnormal business decline. Seventy percent of the companies they sponsored had issues with abnormal business decline, and at least ten companies had financial fraud problems.
For example, the first A-share company to be delisted due to major violations, Boton Environment, was sponsored for listing by CITIC Securities. It was found by the Securities Regulatory Commission to have committed serious financial fraud continuously from 2017 to 2021.
Furthermore, the first stock listed through fraudulent registration, Zijin Storage, was also sponsored for listing by CITIC Securities. The company inflated its operating income by over 430 million yuan and profits by 210 million yuan through fictitious sales contracts, arranging fund returns, and prematurely recognizing income in its prospectus, suspected of the crime of issuing securities fraud, causing losses to nearly 17,000 investors. The company was delisted in October last year.
In May of this year, Zhengzhou Hengda Zhikong had its listing revoked due to irregularities in the financial materials provided during the listing process. Once again, this was sponsored for listing by CITIC Securities.
These are not isolated cases. Among the 141 companies sponsored for listing by CITIC Securities from 2019 to 2022, 65 companies experienced a significant decline in performance in the year following their listing, 83 companies saw their stock prices fall below the issue price, with nearly half experiencing a price drop, and 12 companies saw their stock prices halved from the issue price.
In 2022, the China Securities Association downgraded CITIC Securities' investment banking business quality evaluation from A to B, making it the only brokerage firm among the top "three central and one Hua" brokerage camp to be downgraded to B.
For a company like this to still be able to rank first in practice quality, one can only imagine the quality of business in other companies. How many cases of financial fraud and fraudulent listings have yet to be exposed, only time will tell. The ecological environment of the Chinese securities market has deteriorated to an unprecedented level.
Compared to these deep-seated structural issues, a little favoritism in eating and drinking is nothing.