Wanda Hotel Development, the Hong Kong-listed arm of Dalian Wanda Group, saw shares drop as much as 11 per cent on Monday after its parent responded to claims that its chairman, billionaire Wang Jianlin, had been detained by authorities and forbidden from leaving China.
Mr Wang had been the subject of speculation at the weekend following a story from US-based Chinese-language blog Bowen, which had claimed he and his family had been detained by authorities at an airport in Tianjin and subsequently released, but forbidden to leave China.
Those claims were subsequently reproduced by Chinese-language media elsewhere, including Taiwan’s Apple Daily.