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On October 13, 2026, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission announced action against two groups suspected of participating in IPO fraud schemes: the first, centered on Sun Ran, involved eight offshore companies with frozen assets capped at HK$4.379 billion; the second, involving Liu Haoran and related entities, had approximately HK$285 million in assets frozen.
When cornerstone and anchor investment projects linked to the SFC-named cases (including the Harvest Fund family, the Liu Haoran network, and others) are examined within the same framework, two clear threads emerge: first, the projects involved are predominantly small-cap stocks, and their performance on lock-up expiry dates is mostly negative; second, top-tier sponsor institutions appear with high frequency in these anomalous projects and directly overlap with core investigated cases.
Lock-up Performance: Losses Dominate, Small-Cap Projects Swing Violently
Harvest Fund's participation in Hong Kong IPO cornerstone investments follows two paths — direct participation and indirect participation through SPC vehicles — and the two differ markedly in project characteristics, timing rhythm, and return performance.
Looking at projects where Harvest Fund participated directly as a cornerstone investor, the sample totals five deals, concentrated after late 2025. These projects generally had larger fundraising sizes; for example, Jingsight Integration and Luxshare Precision raised HK$7.33 billion and HK$25.06 billion respectively. On paper returns, apart from Yingpu Intelligence which achieved a floating gain on its lock-up expiry date, the other four projects were all in floating loss territory; however, most of these targets have not yet reached their lock-up expiry windows, so the profit or loss is only an interim result, and current returns are also affected by the external factor of overall weakness in Hong Kong's secondary market.
By contrast, projects where Harvest Fund participated indirectly as a cornerstone investor through SPC vehicles overwhelmingly involved fundraising of only a few hundred million Hong Kong dollars. It is worth noting that despite the small overall size, Harvest Fund's subscription amount per deal in such projects was not low — many subscriptions reached tens of millions or even over a hundred million Hong Kong dollars. This means that within the total issuance, this cornerstone capital accounted for a higher proportion, exerting a stronger influence on the allocation structure of individual new shares. Even during periods of weak market sentiment, such investments continued to be deployed; at lock-up expiry, the stock price performance of the underlying targets was highly divergent — Haixi New Drug, Youjia Innovation, and others posted considerable floating gains, while many other projects saw share prices decline after lock-up expiry, resulting in large floating losses, with returns fluctuating significantly.
Entities related to Liu Haoran are also a key focus of attention in the Hong Kong IPO cornerstone market. The projects they participated in were mainly small and medium-sized issuances, with most targets raising within HK$1 billion, and some raising less than HK$500 million. In terms of lock-up performance, project returns were clearly divergent: Jingfa Property, Zhongmiao Holdings, and EDA Group Holdings achieved positive returns at lock-up expiry, while Bokang Vision-B, Xinqi An, and Weisheng Pharma-B saw significant declines at lock-up expiry, with Bokang Vision-B and Xinqi An both falling more than 50%. The subsequent revelation of abnormal related-party cash management note transactions at Tianju Dihe and Xinqi An has also prompted the market to continuously scrutinize the fund flows and transaction arrangements behind the related investments.
Sponsor Distribution: Heavy Concentration at the Top, Overlap with Investigated Projects
At the sponsor institution level, there is a clear pattern of top-tier concentration: CICC led with 15 deals, while CITIC and Morgan Stanley had 9 and 8 respectively; CMBI, Huatai, and CITIC Construction Investment also participated as sponsors in multiple projects. From a market logic perspective, top investment banks such as CICC are themselves the primary sponsors in the Hong Kong IPO market, underwriting a larger base of projects, so their higher project counts on this statistical list have an objective base-probability explanation — one cannot presume anomalies solely from concentrated project numbers.
But the list reveals a phenomenon worth noting: these cornerstone investors that the market is closely watching have long partnered with a small number of sponsor institutions, with high project overlap. More alarming to the market than project counts is the direct overlap between certain top-tier sponsors and the core investigated projects named by the SFC: CICC was the sole sponsor of Cha Baidao, which is a core investigated project of Sun Ran and related entities; CITIC Securities was the sole sponsor of Tianju Dihe, a core investigated project of the Liu Haoran network; in addition, Huatai and CCB International served as joint sponsors of Bokang Vision-B.
Conclusion: The "Gatekeeper" Role Faces Scrutiny
Taken together, this sample of projects exhibits three characteristics: indirect investments are mostly concentrated in highly volatile small-cap stocks with a "small cap, large bet" phenomenon; sponsor institutions are concentrated at the top; and lock-up expiry dates show polarization. In the Hong Kong market, sponsors are known as the "gatekeepers" of IPOs. When some projects, with extremely small issuance sizes, bring in anomalous cornerstone funds taking up an extremely high single-deal proportion; when the same top investment banks frequently appear in such high-volatility small-cap projects; and when top brokerage names appear on the sponsor lists of investigated projects, the market has reason to demand that regulators, while tracing fund links, also re-examine sponsors' risk control and due diligence responsibilities in these matters.
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