Wall Street Journal: Jack Ma plans to cede control of the Ant Group.

In an effort to win over regulators during a protracted crackdown, Chinese billionaire Jack Ma reportedly plans to relinquish ownership of Ant Group Co, according to a Thursday Wall Street Journal story. The transfer of power by Ma might push up Ant’s initial public offering by a year or more, according to Dow Jones. The article highlighted Chinese securities laws that require enterprises that have changed ownership to suspend their public listings.

Alibaba has not yet addressed it in the media. The company’s US-listed shares were trading lower before the bell.

Ma, a 57-year-old former English teacher who is now one of the most well-known business people in China, has been the target of government action that appears to have been done to reduce his influence and the power of his enterprises.

Ant has had authority over the business since he severed his predecessor assets from Alibaba more than ten years ago. He eventually turned it into a corporation that currently runs the Alipay payments network, which has over one billion users, as well as a sizeable microlending business and an investing platform that once housed the biggest money-market fund in the history of the globe. It was estimated that Ant would be worth more than $300 billion if it went public.

Ma is a titan at Ant, holding 50.52 percent of the business’s shares through a company in which he has a strong stake while not being an officer or board member.

According to some of the sources, he might have ceded control by transferring some of his voting power to other Ant officials, like Chief Executive Eric Jing, so that they would all have collective influence over the company.

Ant was reportedly looking for ways for Ma to give up control and sell his shareholding in the top financial technology company, according to a Reuters article from the previous year. Ant, a unit of Alibaba, has undergone a comprehensive restructuring by China after the country’s regulators halted its $37 billion initial public offering in late 2020. After the cancellation, Ant, which Ma controls, started a regulatory-driven reorganisation plan that would transform it into a financial holding company.