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"Is it possible to become the richest man in China and not be corrupt? I\u2019ve been thinking about that ever since I profiled Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin last spring.\nWang has been in the news a lot since then. In June he bought British yacht maker Sunseeker for $500 million; and invested $1.1 billion in a planned luxury hotel in London\u2014part of his stated ambition, as he once told me, to \u201Cput our iconic buildings in the major cities across the whole world.\u201D\u00A0In September he announced plans to spend $8.7 billion on what he says will be the world\u2019s biggest TV and film production studio, Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis; that should dovetail nicely with his $2.6 billion purchase last year of theater chain AMC. In November he bought a Picasso painting, Claude et Paloma, at auction for $28.2 million,\u00A0more than twice what Christie\u2019s thought it would sell for. Meanwhile, in Bloomberg\u2019s estimation, he has gone from the second richest man in China, to the first, to the third, while his net worth has risen nearly 50%, to around $12 billion.\nAll of which could have been buried under a far less flattering set of headlines. In November the The New York Times revealed that Bloomberg editors in New York, perhaps fearful of offending China, had quashed a major investigative piece examining ties between China\u2019s business and political elite.\u00A0The Times didn\u2019t say what Bloomberg had, but according to the Financial Times, \u201CSeveral people familiar with the story said it focused on Wang Jianlin.\u201D\n\nI have no evidence that Wang engaged in corrupt behavior at any point during his rise from a modest boyhood in rural Sichuan Province, through the ranks in the People\u2019s Liberation Army, to the chairmanship of Wanda Group and control of the biggest commercial real estate empire in China.\nAs I noted in my story, however, \u201CEvery Wanda project starts with land, and all the land in China belongs to the government, meaning Wanda can&amp;#8217;t get to step one without the consent of bureaucrats, many of whom expect bribes for their cooperation on business deals.\u201D I also pointed out that Wang got his start in business in the coastal city of Dalian during the 1990s, when the mayor, and later provincial governor, was Bo Xilai. Bo was found guilty of corruption earlier this year and sentenced to life in prison.\n\nWang told me that he\u2019d been on guard against corruption since he started his business, in the practical belief that bribing government officials was not a good long-term strategy for success. He told me about the financial controls he put in place. For instance, there\u2019s no such thing as petty cash at Wanda; every expenditure has a paper trail.\nThe most persuasive case he made, in my view, is that at this stage of its development (if not necessarily when the company was new), Wanda has no motive to grease anyone\u2019s palms. That\u2019s because Wanda doesn\u2019t pitch projects anymore. Instead it fields far more requests than it could ever handle from municipalities that want what only Wanda can deliver\u2014large scale, no-hassle, image-buffing, tax-revenue-producing urban redevelopment, completed on time and on budget. Wanda is in the driver\u2019s seat, not the government officials. \u201CThey come to me,\u201D Wang said, \u201Casking us to invest, to work with them, to help them. So how can I bribe them? There\u2019s no chance I can bribe them.\u201D\nCorruption, of course, has many faces. Wanda may well be squeaky clean when it comes to bribing public servants, and something else entirely when it comes to paying true market value for real estate. Such was the strong implication in a recent report published in Guangzhou&amp;#8217;s 21st Century Business Herald, and summarized in Taiwan\u2019s Want China Times.\u00A0The Herald identified three cases in which Wanda was forced by local authorities to submit new, higher bids on land it had already purchased. According to the Times, \u201CThe three land repurchases had one thing in common: Wanda had secured an agreement with local governments ahead of the purchases to allow the company to buy the plots of land at rock-bottom prices. The Ministry of Land and Resources detected the irregularities however and ordered a halt to the monopolistic activities, according to Guangdong&amp;#8217;s Department of Land and Resources.\u201D\nAgain, to be clear: As far as I know, Wanda Group has never broken any laws. But this, too, is clear. Given Wang\u2019s obsession for sweating the details, his instance on strict centralized control of every facet of his empire, if Wanda Group is ever found to have crossed the line, we\u2019ll know who to blame. Wang understands that. \u201CIf someone bribe,\u201D he told me, \u201Cthey will never say, \u2018That\u2019s the guy.\u2019 They will always say, \u2018That\u2019s Chairman Wang\u2019s problem.\u2019\u201D"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://fortune.com/2013/12/19/was-chinese-billionaire-wang-jianlin-the-focus-of-bloombergs-quashed-investigation/>