SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China’s securities regulator said on Friday it is confident it will reach an agreement with U.S. counterparts on securities supervision, after U.S.-listed Chinese stocks tumbled as the first Chinese firms to be potentially de-listed were named.
Earlier this week, the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) identified five New York-listed Chinese companies that will be delisted if they do not provide access to audit documents, according to an 8 March post on its official website.
Washington is demanding complete access to the books of U.S-listed Chinese companies, but Beijing bars foreign inspection of working papers from local accounting firms – an auditing dispute that puts hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. investments at stake.
In the note posted on its official WeChat page, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) said that together with the Ministry of Finance, it has continued to communicate with the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and has made “positive progress”.
The CSRC also added that it firmly opposes the “politicising of securities supervision”.
(Reporting by Roxanne Liu, Samuel Shen and Engen Tham in Shanghai; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell)
