By Terril Yue Jones, Sui-Lee Wee and Jason Subler
Nov 26 (Reuters) - China's second-biggest insurance company
has threatened to take legal action against the New York Times
for reports that Premier Wen Jiabao's relatives had accumulated
massive wealth, largely through holdings in the firm.
In a written statement on Monday, Ping An Insurance (Group)
Co of China Ltd said it had "noted recent media coverage related
to the company, which contains serious inaccuracies, facts being
distorted and taken out of context, as well as flawed logic."
It added that it "will take appropriate legal action
commensurate with the damage and adverse impact the media
reports have caused to the company."
Ping An did not name the New York Times Co in the
statement, but a Ping An spokesman told Reuters that it referred
to a New York Times article published over the weekend.
The New York Times issued a report in October, citing
corporate and regulatory records that it said showed Wen's
family had amassed massive wealth during his time in power, the
biggest source of which it said was large stakes in Ping An.
On Saturday, it issued a follow-up report, saying that in
1999, Ping An Chairman Ma Mingzhe wrote to Wen - who was vice
premier at the time - and another official, imploring them to
relax rules aimed at containing risk in the financial sector
that would have required a breakup of the company.
Ping An remained intact, and relatives of Wen eventually
came to control Taihong, a company that acquired a large stake
in Ping An in December 2002, eight months after the waiver on
breaking up the company was granted, the Times said.
The price paid by Taihong was one-fourth that paid by HSBC
Holdings PLC for a stake it bought two months earlier, the Times
added.
The Times said it was not clear whether Wen had personally
intervened on behalf of Ping An's request for a waiver, or if
Wen was even aware of the stakes held by his relatives.
"We stand by our story," New York Times spokeswoman Eileen
Murphy said in an email to Reuters, adding that the company did
not plan to comment further at this time.
Lawyers representing the family of Premier Wen have rejected
claims by the Times that relatives had accumulated at least $2.7
billion. A Foreign Ministry spokesman declined to comment
directly on Monday, but previously the ministry had criticized
the paper's investigation, saying it "smears China and has
ulterior motives".
Since its initial report on the wealth of Wen's family in
late October - including documents that showed the premier's
mother had holdings of $120 million worth of Ping An stock in
2007 - the newspaper's English and Chinese language websites
have been blocked in China.
The website of Bloomberg news has also been blocked in China
since it reported in June that the extended family of
president-designate Xi Jinping had investments in companies with
assets of $375 million, and an 18 percent indirect stake in a
company with $1.7 billion in assets.
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