The People's Bank of China announced in a statement that Ant Group, Alibaba's payments subsidiary, has been fined 7.12 billion yuan, or $984 million. The decision was made after nearly two years of investigation into Ant Group.

Beijing fined Ant nearly $1 billion while Alibaba jumps to Wall Street in pre-session. According to the Central Bank statement, the company has been sanctioned for violations in the areas of payment, settlement, anti-money laundering and the sale of funds. Most of the key issues with financial platforms like Ant Group and Tencent Holdings have been rectified, the PBOC claims. The Postal Savings Bank of China, Ping An Bank, PICC Property and Casualty and a Tencent payment platform were also recently sanctioned, the regulator said in a statement, without giving further details

Its parent company, Alibaba, was fined a record 18 billion yuan in 2021 for violating antitrust laws. For the wider tech sector, this financial sanction marks a key step towards ending Beijing's ferocious crackdown on private companies, which began with the veto of Ant's IPO and which then resulted in billions in capitalization gone up in smoke for the most important Chinese tech companies