Tenpay, a Tencent Holdings company, has received a fine from China’s foreign exchange regulator for violation of foreign exchange rules.
The Shenzhen branch of SAFE (State Administration of Foreign Exchange) has fined Tenpay 2.78 million yuan ($436,000) for misconduct, including conducting foreign exchange business beyond the scope of its registration.
The FX regulator also gave the company a number of warnings, ordered it to rectify the violations and confiscate illegal gains,
The official statement reads: “In response to the problems found in the routine inspection in 2019-2020, Tenpay has immediately formulated an improvement plan and implemented it item by item, and has now completed the rectification of all of them.”
It added that the company will further strengthen compliance management under the guidance of SAFE’s Shenzhen branch.
China launched a widespread clampdown on its technology sector this year, with the competition regulator, in particular, dishing out fines and warnings and conducting investigations into the biggest names in the “platform economy”.
At the beginning of this year, China’s central bank has ordered Jack Ma, one of the countries richest people and co-founder of Alibaba, a multinational technology company, to reign in his fintech empire with a major shake-up and scale back of the Ant Group‘s operations.
With an even higher hand, the country’s central bank announced that all transactions of cryptocurrencies are now illegal, as of 24th September, banning digital tokens such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. This move has been viewed by many as a strategy to accelerate China’s fast-developing CBDC.
