More blows for Alibaba despite firing manager in sex case

Alibaba shares fell after a female employee at the tech giant said she was sexually assaulted by a manager and state media warned the company it must not operate under a "too big to fail delusion."

The male manager, named Wang Chengwen, "has been fired and will never be rehired," Alibaba chief executive Daniel Zhang Yong said in an intranet memo yesterday.

Police are investigating the matter.

Wang had also applied for a position at ByteDance and actually passed the first round before the Beijing-based owner of TikTok and Douyin said it suspended his recruitment and will blacklist him if a crime or immoral act is confirmed.

The alleged victim posted an 11-page account on Alibaba's intranet saying her manager and a client sexually assaulted her and that superiors and human resources had not taken the matter seriously in the five days since reporting it.

The manager, at grocery delivery unit Neighbourhood Retail, said he was involved in "intimate acts" when the employee was inebriated, according to Zhang.

The unit's president Li Yonghe and human resources generalist Xu Kun have resigned while Judy Tong Wenhong, chief people officer, was given demerits as punishment for not acting in a timely and appropriate manner, the memo said.

Zhang also announced company-wide training for the prevention of sexual harassment. He said Alibaba is staunchly opposed to "the ugly culture of forced drinking," referring to the female employee's account of the incident in which she said her manager ordered her to drink.

"This incident is a humiliation for all Alibaba employees. We must rebuild, and we must change," he said.

Police in Jinan city, East China's Shandong Province, said an investigation is in progress, and the result will be made public at the earliest available opportunity.

An online commentator wrote in a WeChat official account under People's Daily that capital can never control the media, days after the sexual scandal topped search trends on Weibo.

"Alibaba could not offer an answer that satisfies public opinion for this ham-handed inaction," said an editorial in the Global Times newspaper.

Internally, on a group chat dedicated to the issue, staff have demanded justice and measures to prevent sexual harassment. A notice on Alibaba's workplace messaging app DingTalk showed the group had more than 6,000 members as of Sunday.

Shares of Alibaba fell 2.48 percent to HK$188.70 after a dive of as much as 4 percent yesterday.

victor.zhong@singtaonewscorp.com