Shareholders of troubled Chinese aquaculture firm Sino Agro Food are seeking to have a temporary receiver appointed to oversee the firm’s operations.
Heng Ren Investments and Norwegian investor Arne H. Fredly are listed as the plaintiffs in an upcoming 9 December hearing before Judge Jesse Furman in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The defendants are listed as both SinoAgro Food and the company’s CEO, Solomon Yip Kun Lee, with an address in Guangzhou.
Sino Agro is incorporated in the U.S. state of Nevada and listed on the Over the Counter Markets Group Pink Sheets market. The value of its share price collapsed by 90 percent between 2015 and 2019 as the company suffered a series of setbacks. In 2019, Sino Agro was delisted from the Oslo Merkur stock exchange due to violations of the exchange’s disclosure rules.
In documents provided to the court and seen by SeafoodSource, the plaintiffs outline a history of what they deemed as mismanagement and lack of disclosure at Sino Agro Food, and allege non-delivery of earlier promises by the company CEO to improve corporate governance. The documents also suggest the company’s shrimp “megafarm” is no longer functional, and allege the farm’s assets have been seized by a local court in China after the property’s owners were not paid rent. The suit also alleges mismanagement in respect to the company’s promised major investments in aquaculture projects in Angola and India, neither of which have come to fruition.
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.-based Heng Ren Investments focuses on undervalued Chinese companies listed on overseas exchanges. Among its other investments are vaccine-maker Sinovac Biotech.
Photo courtesy of Sino Agro Food
