The Caviar Scam is Finally Collapsing (and China is Behind It)

The Caviar Scam is Finally Collapsing (and China is Behind It) - On the thirtieth of June this year, a caviar company rang the bell on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Ticker six seven one five. Opening price, seventy five Hong Kong dollars and fifty cents a share. And it did not go public to raise money for a bigger farm. It went public to confirm, in a regulatory filing that anyone on earth can read, something the entire high end of European dining had spent two decades trying very hard not to say out loud. Here is the reversal. This is not a story about a scam getting caught. It is collapsing because the company at the center of it stood up in the open and put its own name on the thing it was supposedly hiding behind. By the time trading opened, the company was valued at roughly eight billion Hong Kong dollars — just over a billion US dollars — with BlackRock's funds alone taking close to a fifth of the shares on offer, alongside Barings and a major Chinese insurer. Six weeks after that bell, on the thirteenth of August, the same company was named the official restaurant event partner of the Michelin Guide Singapore. Its executives handed the Young Chef Award, on a Michelin stage, to a chef named Shusuke Kubota. The company is called Kaluga Queen. It farms sturgeon on a reservoir in Zhejiang province called Qiandao Lake. And it has been, by its own accounting and nobody has seriously disputed it, the largest caviar producer on earth by sales volume for eleven years running, shipping now to forty six countries. And here is the part that should make you sit up. None of this required breaking a single law. It required one thing: a label, printed on the underside of a tin, carrying two letters that almost nobody sitting at the table has ever been shown.