Before CLSA was acquired in 2013, the Hong Kong brokerage’s research division issued a warning to investors in Chinese financial companies: beware of “high-frequency interference” from the Communist Party.Nearly a decade on, there’s no better example of how the Chinese government can transform a financial firm than CLSA itself.The latest case in point: CLSA executives have for the first time been ordered by their bosses at state-owned Citic Securities Ltd. to participate in China’s five-year planning process, a ritual that Communist Party leaders have used to guide the nation’s economy since the 1950s, people familiar with the matter said. Major state-owned enterprises are required to submit five-year plans to the government, and CLSA’s outlook will now feed into Citic’s report to Beijing, which is unveiling a new road map in October, one of the people said.
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