Beijing has removed the powerful Communist party boss and chair of its securities regulator as authorities battle plunging confidence in Chinese stock markets, reports the Financial Times. The Communist party’s central committee replaced Yi Huiman with Wu Qing, a senior official who made a name for himself cracking down on brokerages, as China Securities Regulatory Commission chair and party secretary, state news agency Xinhua reported on Wednesday.
The terse report did not provide any explanation for the decision to remove Yi. Before leading the CSRC, he was the chair of the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), whose past executives have been targeted in widespread corruption probes.
“He’s clearly gone down because of the market slump,” said Chris Beddor, deputy director of China research at Gavekal. “Part of his de facto job as securities regulator was to prevent exactly this from happening: a politically embarrassing market decline.”