On the afternoon of January 18, Yantai Bairun Real Estate Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Bairun Real Estate") released a report letter titled "Report Letter on Vanke's Tax Evasion" on the company's official WeChat public account. The "whistleblower letter" was signed by 10 local companies in Yantai, including Bairun Real Estate, which are all minority shareholders of Vanke Yantai.
In fact, before the fermentation of the "report letter", Bairun Real Estate had published several articles on its WeChat public account, directly pointing out Vanke's suspected tax evasion, benefit transfer and other non-compliant behaviors.
In the "Whistleblower Letter", Vanke's methods of "tax evasion" are mainly summarized into two aspects: one is to conceal income, and the other is to inflate costs, and greatly compress the company's profits through "two-way effect" to achieve the purpose of evading state taxes.
In terms of concealed income, it pointed out that on the one hand, Yantai Vanke started from inconspicuous garages, parking spaces and sheds, sold them at extremely low prices or directly "gifted" them to launder the money from the project company; on the other hand, it did not deal with the sale of "housing debts" and concealed taxable income; in addition, under Vanke's manipulation, it directly reduced its taxable income through "expensive sales and cheap reports".
In terms of inflating costs, that is, increasing the expenses of the project company, Bairun Real Estate listed how Vanke entrusted affiliated enterprises to participate in the construction and fabricated the amount of construction to increase the project construction cost.
For example, when the funds were abundant, Vanke used factoring, acceptance bills and other means to pay the construction party and suppliers, resulting in a loss of 30 million yuan in interest discount and increased financial expenses. In addition, there are also false invoices related to commissions and promotion fees, and even illegal purchase of invoices.
What's more, in order to increase the cost of project construction, when purchasing engineering visas, the project cost is inflated, and affiliated enterprises are found to participate in the construction of fictitious project quantities, etc., and the inflated amount involved is even more huge.
Bairun Real Estate claimed that Vanke's operations of "inflating income" also included increasing financial expenses and laundering income from the project company by means of factoring and interest discounts; purchasing and issuing false value-added tax invoices and listing unreasonable expenses to increase project construction costs; purchasing project visas to inflate project costs and increase project construction costs; and using shoddy and low-cost simple packaging to falsely report "fine decoration" to increase housing construction costs.
Vanke seems to be quite proficient in the trick of "selling gold at the price of cabbage", selling off parking spaces, storage rooms and other project assets at prices far below the market price, which looks like a loss-making transaction, but in fact it is a master's trick, selling it at a high price again through a third party, and reaping the benefits of the fisherman. This in and out not only washed out a lot of money, but also moistened a group of "insiders" by the way.
The letter pointed out that Vanke may have lost or confused its internal accounts, or that it was delaying the payment of accounts due to fear of being detected. The whistleblower also mentioned a case of tax evasion of about 30 million yuan, alleging that Vanke falsely lowered the unit price of the house at the time of liquidation to evade taxes.
In addition, the content of the report also involves illegal operations, money laundering, the establishment of small coffers and high-interest loans.
1. Usury
According to the whistleblower letter, Yu Liang's Vanke empire is actually a huge "shadow bank", controlling more than 3,000 investment companies and asset management companies, comparable to the real-life version of the "king of a thousand faces". These Vanke "vests" are not simple roles, they secretly give Vanke's cooperative shareholders a "sweet burden" of up to 40% of the comprehensive cost, and all this, Vanke laughs at the high intermediary fees and financing fees, which can be described as "dancers on the tip of the knife".
2. Misappropriation of funds
The report letter said that a super project operated by Vanke in the local area had sales of nearly 7 billion yuan, but it did not expect that the 5 billion yuan would disappear without a trace overnight. It turned out that this huge amount of money flowed into the pockets of a series of mysterious companies such as "Beijing Wanpeng" and "Red Rising", which can be made into a "real estate version of Mission Impossible".
3. Money laundering of leather bag companies
The whistleblower letter revealed that the team led by Yu Liang played "threading the needle" and skillfully used a bunch of seemingly ordinary investment companies and asset management companies to make a big circle of money in the gray area such as lending income and intermediary fees, and successfully avoided the public eye. There are even rumors that some of the funds have been transferred abroad, which is really a cross-border "cat and mouse game".
4. Use the co-investment mechanism to make money
With the help of Vanke's co-investment policy, Yu Liang and other executives seem to have obtained an "invisibility charm". They borrowed loans from financial institutions, although the interest rate is not high, but the game is novel enough, and these funds go around and back to their own co-investment company, a trick of "empty gloves white wolf" to play perfectly, and by the way, they also use the credit funds of the state to support the real economy to fill their own pockets.
Vanke's co-investment system requires the management of the company in the region where the project is located, the management of the company in the city where the project is located, and the project management team to co-invest.
The co-investment system is to let employees and executives pay for the project out of their own pockets, so that in terms of benefit distribution, everyone is willing to invest funds in projects with high profits. If the co-investment system is adopted, and the employee pays his own money to join the project, then he must be responsible for the project, because this is linked to his interests. In doing so, it has played a positive role in improving efficiency and ensuring the quality of the project.
According to Vanke's settlement income in 2018, the average return of the top 5 projects is about 35%, the total amount subscribed is 8.5 billion yuan, and the income received is 3 billion yuan, which is how many times higher than the bank interest?
It seems that the co-investment mechanism is for the benefit of employees, but in fact it is a tool used by Yu Liang and his executives to make money. In practice, Vanke did not share risks and profits with its partners.
Taking the Yantai Vanke Seattle project as an example, Yu Liang's team took 400% of the profits from the invested funds and distributed them when the project was not completed, but the shareholders and Vanke listed companies as partners only got less than 10% of the profits.
In addition, the whistleblower said that in the project co-investment, it has never heard of any senior executives losing money in the co-investment, but it is the lowest and most ordinary employees of Vanke who have lost the most money in the co-investment.
In short, the main content of the whistleblower letter can be summarized as follows: Vanke conveyed benefits to several executives led by Yu Liang through other affiliated enterprises by compressing profits and extracorporeal circulation. The method of operation is to lower the profit and transfer the money, and the second is to convert this part of the money into equity and get it back, and the management will divide it.
Specific means include: false invoicing, false VAT to raise the purchase price, the establishment of capital companies, and the increase of enterprise capital costs. In fact, it is not only Vanke that does this, almost all real estate companies and construction companies do this.
Vanke has set up an asset management platform, which is usually responsible for financing listed companies, and the interest rate is relatively high, so that executives can earn high interest. For some good projects, the asset management platform will naturally participate in them and obtain high dividends, and the general projects will be handed over to the company to do, and even the executives will eat rebates as Party A, etc., and obtain various benefits through these channels.
However, since Vanke is a state-owned enterprise, if it does so openly, it will bear the responsibility for the loss of state-owned assets. Therefore, Vanke's management can only make money by holding shares. In 2014, Vanke launched two plans, named the Fortune Wings Plan and the Deying Plan, which together accounted for 7.8% of Vanke's equity. In addition, Vanke also launched a 10 billion repurchase plan, but it will not be implemented in the future.
The reason is that Vanke's plan can be implemented smoothly when real estate makes money, and it is nothing more than a question of how much dividends are distributed by all parties and who will take the big and small amounts. But when the current property market is in trouble, there will be problems.
Just like the plot in the movie "Let the Bullets Fly", "the money of the gentry is returned, and the people's money is divided into threes and sevens". The property market is not profitable, Yu Liang and other executives take their shares, but the shares of other partners have been greatly reduced, which makes them how to endure it, and they can only choose to report. In this regard, on March 11, Moody's downgraded Vanke's credit rating from 3B to junk rating.
Facts have proved that after Yu Liang took over Vanke, he still continued Wang Shi's business strategy and did not make much changes. It can be seen that Vanke's above problems existed as early as Wang Shi's tenure as chairman of the board of directors, which also means that this mine has been buried more than ten years ago.
Yao Zhenhua, who was shrewd back then, saw at a glance that there was a lot of information in Vanke's business mode, taking land at such a low price, with such low profits and low stock prices, no matter how you look at it, you can feel that there are huge profits hidden in it. Therefore, he was bent on buying Vanke shares in the secondary market and eventually obtaining a controlling stake in Vanke.
However, under such circumstances, Wang Shi strongly opposed Yao Zhenhua's acquisition of a controlling stake in Vanke, and publicly declared that Yao Zhenhua was a barbarian. Finally, under the coordinated operation of Shenzhen State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, Shenzhen Metro settled in Vanke and became the controlling shareholder.
Imagine, if Yao Zhenhua's plan is successful, he becomes the chairman of Vanke, and the company's assets are checked and regulated, then the small treasury hidden under the riotous operation of Wang Shi and other executives will be exposed, and they will have to spit it out all when they ate it before. And Vanke's thunder will not be delayed until now, and it exploded as early as 2015.
epilogue
At present, it is no longer possible to rely on Vanke to save itself, and the downgrade of international rating agencies has made it more difficult for Vanke to raise funds, while the decline in sales and the maturity of debts have doubled the pressure on debt repayment.
Now the key depends on the attitude of the Shenzhen State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, when the cost price of Shenzhen Metro's acquisition of Vanke was as high as 18 yuan, and now Vanke's market value has shrunk by more than 80%, and the major shareholder Shenzhen Metro has lost more than 50%, which has been deeply trapped. If Shenzhen State-owned Assets protects Vanke at any cost, it can still be saved, but according to normal market rules, Vanke is likely to embark on the road of asset restructuring or bankruptcy liquidation like Evergrande.
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