Tycoon who flew too close to the sun

China’s richest man saw £9bn wiped off his company’s value in a worrying week for the Hong Kong market

Power cut: a market manipulation inquiry has been launched into Li Hejun’s solar film company (Corbis)

A prediction is not a reality. When things become a reality, people no longer
need a prediction.” So begins China’s New Energy Revolution, the masterwork
recently published by Li Hejun, solar tycoon and, until last week, the
richest man in China.

The book proved prophetic, but not in the way Li had hoped.

For months, analysts and journalists had predicted that his Hong Kong-listed
Hanergy Thin Film Power was primed for a fall. Since September, shares in
the solar developer had, for no obvious reason, quintupled. The stock was
thinly traded, ignored by analysts, and barely held by big institutional
investors. Much of its business was done through opaque deals with its
private parent company. Yet its advance seemed unstoppable.

In March, the business magazine Forbes crowned Li, who owns 71% of Hanergy,
China’s richest man, pushing him past Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, and Wang
Jianlin, property mogul and