Major financial firms hold shares in Chinese fishing company sanctioned by US

Correction: The following companies were previously listed by SeafoodSource as shareholders of Pingtan Marine Enterprise, based on a Marketscreener report: Polar Asset Management Partners, AQR Capital Management LLC, Columbia Threadneedle Asset Managers, Fir Tree Capital Management LP, Deutsche Bank Securities, Bulldog Investors LLP, GLG Partners LP, Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, and Castle Creek Arbitrage LLC. This list contains outdated information and some of the named companies are no longer shareholders in Pingtan Marine.

Many large Western finance companies continue to hold shares in a Chinese fisheries company, despite it being sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for alleged labor abuses.

Pingtan Marine was sanctioned along with Dalian Ocean Fishing on Friday, 9 December, for alleged labor abuses onboard their vessels by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. The Nasdaq Stock Exchange halted trading in Pingtan Marine Enterprise soon after the sanctions were announced as it sought unspecified additional information from the company.

Also sanctioned was Pingtan Marine founder, chairman, and CEO Xinrong Zhuo, as well as other fishing-related companies controlled by Pingtan, and Dalian Ocean Fishing Chairman and General Manager Li Zhenyu. The designation freezes any U.S. assets of the companies and individuals and bars them from doing business in the United States.

Zhuo is listed as Pingtan’s controlling shareholder, with a 52.8 percent stake, but according to CNN Business, other shareholders are Geode Capital Management LLC, Citadel Securities LLC, Renaissance Technologies LLC, Virtu Financial BD LLC, UBS Securities LLC, Two Sigma Securities LLC, Millennium Management LLC, City National Rochdale LLC, and Jane Street Capital LLC.

In April 2022, Washington, D.C., U.S.A.-based nonprofit Center for Advanced Defense Studies, which provides analysis on transnational security issues, called on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Nasdaq Stock Exchange to conduct a review of Pingtan’s public listing.

Francois Mosnier, head of the oceans program at nonprofit financial think tank Planet Finance, said he expects the sanctions will result in some pullback of investment in the two Chinese companies.

“[The sanctions] send a very strong message – maybe also a political one – on human rights abuse … because they will effectively prevent any US person/organization to do business with, fund or own these companies,” Mosnier said. “It won’t prevent these two companies from continuing to sell their seafood in China, their main or only market, but it might lead some clients to stop doing business with them. For instance, Mitsubishi stopped buying tuna from Dalian Ocean Fishing in mid-2020 after the death of four Indonesian deckhands on one of Dalian’s boat.”

Photo courtesy of Kent Johansson/Shutterstock