Police in Beijing’s Chaoyang district have opened a criminal investigation into Chinese wealth manager CreditEase and imposed “criminal coercive measures” on its controller and several other suspects, Beijing police said in a statement on Monday.
The case marks a fresh step in Beijing’s push to tackle the complex lending hidden in the shadow banking sector, which regulators have spent years trying to unwind.
The suspects include CreditEase’s actual controller, a 53-year-old man surnamed Tang, and a 51-year-old woman surnamed Zhao, the statement said. It urged investors to register their cases with police and cooperate with efforts to recover assets and minimise losses.
The announcement follows CreditEase’s abrupt suspension in May of redemptions on quasi-fixed-income products worth 30 billion yuan ($4.5 billion), according to a letter sent to some of its investors on Sunday, local media outlet Yicai reported.
In the letter, the company said it had commissioned a third-party firm to audit its assets and liabilities, and that financial due diligence advisers had preliminarily found CreditEase Group may be “insolvent, with a large debt repayment gap”, according to the report.
CreditEase did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Founded in 2006, Beijing-based CreditEase launched peer-to-peer (P2P) platform Yirendai in 2012 and listed it in New York in 2015, making it the first Chinese P2P lender to go public overseas.
After a wave of P2P platforms collapsed in 2018, CreditEase later shifted to a loan facilitation model to comply with tighter regulation. It transitioned to a model that helps banks and other institutions extend loans, and it also sells wealth management products to high-net-worth clients.
Yiren Digital, its US-listed arm, reported a net loss of 944 million yuan for the first half of 2026, compared with a net profit of 605 million yuan in the first half of 2025.
Beijing has in recent years stepped up efforts to minimise shadow banking risks and contain systemic financial risk.
In April, a Beijing court ordered the liquidation of Zhongzhi Enterprise Group and more than 300 related entities, a major step towards resolving one of China’s biggest shadow banking collapses.
($1 = 6.6921 Chinese yuan renminbi)
Reuters
