• Zhongzhi units engaged in potentially illegal practices before Chinese shadow bank’s collapse, records show
• Practices involved guaranteeing returns; using new investor funds to pay returns on existing wealth management products
• Chinese regulators had prohibited capital pool business and guaranteeing of returns to prevent financial instability
• Zhongzhi and relevant units did not respond to Reuters queries about such practices

Zhongzhi Enterprise Group, a former leader of China’s shadow banking sector that declared insolvency last year, used aggressive and potentially illegal sales practices to sustain its operations as it lurched toward collapse, according to new records.

China’s years-long property boom had propelled Beijing-headquartered Zhongzhi to the top of the country’s $18 trillion asset-management industry and made it a key player in a shadow banking sector the size of the French economy. Asset managers such as Zhongzhi sell wealth-management products to investors. The proceeds are then channeled by licensed trust firms like its Zhongrong unit to developers and other companies that cannot tap bank funding directly because of poor creditworthiness or other reasons.

Previously unreported details show that about a year before its financial troubles burst into the open, Zhongzhi units were paying returns to existing investors in wealth-management products by using funds from new investors, and promising individual investors lucrative returns that belied the group’s exposure to a deepening property crisis.

China’s trust firms are known as shadow banks because they operate outside many of the rules that govern commercial lenders. But China’s top banking regulator in 2018 specified that financial institutions including shadow banks and asset managers should not set up capital pools, to prevent them from using money from new sales to cover returns on existing wealth-management products, nor should they guarantee returns on wealth-management products.