Hong Kong’s market watchdog has not denied it is investigating some of the companies involved in a mysterious stock price crash on Tuesday that erased $6bn in capitalisation and left the worst of the fallers down 94 per cent.
A total of 13 stocks closed at least 50 per cent lower on Tuesday and almost all of those lost that value in less than an hour — a pattern reminiscent of the collapse in March of Huishan Dairy, which lost $4bn, or 85 per cent, of its capitalisation in just over an hour when a lender to the company’s chairman sold shares it held as collateral.
Tuesday’s plunges were the latest in a series of wild swings in the city’s stocks.