Alibaba founder Jack Ma has blasted international financial regulations and said China needs to chart its own path, days before Ant Group launches the world’s biggest initial public offering, reported the Financial Times.
“The Basel Accords are like an old people’s club . . . we can’t use yesterday’s methods to regulate the future,” Ma said at a conference in Shanghai on the weekend, referring to the international banking supervision framework.
Ma said the challenges that the rules were designed to resolve were not relevant to China’s phase of development. “Many of the world’s problems” stemmed from “only talking about risk control, not talking about development, not thinking about young people’s or developing countries’ opportunities”, he said.
The dual listing in Hong Kong and Shanghai of Ant, the financial services group, is expected to raise at least $30 billion, in an IPO that would top the previous record of $29.4 billion raised in 2019 by Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company.