A bogus foreign company, which claimed to be a Fortune 500 firm with contracts with the government in Handan, Hebei Province swindled them, banks and others of hundreds of millions of yuan.
Local courts ordered the Handan assets of a Hong Kong-registered construction company, disguised as South Korea's Hyundai Group, frozen after a project was halted for being fake, the China Real Estate Business reported.
Hyundai's Beijing said on Monday that it did not invest in any project in Handan, declining to say what action it plans to take.
Introduced as a key project for attracting investments in Handan in 2009, the company has received about 600 million yuan from the local government between 2011 and 2013, anonymous sources quoted by the China Real Estate Business as saying.
The project covers an area of about 666,000 square meters, including the Hyundai International Automobile Exhibition Center and 4S auto repair shops.
The actual name of the bogus company was Hyundai RNC Investment Group Ltd under the name of Kim Young-kyul, with a registered capital of HK$50,000.
However, the company's name on the documents given to the Handan government was mistranslated into Chinese as the Hyundai Group, rather than its real name, according to the report.
The Handan government even failed to check the company's authenticity, when local officials attended a signing ceremony at the headquarters of the Hyundai Group in June 2009. The building is rented out for any business activity.
A bogus foreign company, which claimed to be a Fortune 500 firm with contracts with the government in Handan, Hebei Province swindled them, banks and others of hundreds of millions of yuan.
