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1st LD-Writethru: Chinese shares slump on Monday

Xinhua, December 12, 2016 Adjust font size:

Chinese stocks tumbled on Monday as China's top insurance regulator continued to check the "barbaric" behavior of insurers to control financial risks brought about by speculative stake buyouts.

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index dropped 2.47 percent to close at 3,152.97 points. The smaller Shenzhen index closed 4.51 percent lower at 10,302.85 points.

The ChiNext Index, China's NASDAQ-style board of growth enterprises, lost 5.5 percent to close at 1,984.39 points.

Turnover on the two exchanges stood at 651.8 billion yuan (94.4 billion U.S. dollars).

More than 2,600 stocks on the two bourses fell and nearly 200 stocks sank by the daily limit of 10 percent, with sectors including banking, real estate and insurance losing the most.

China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC), which recently began to check the "barbaric" behavior of insurers, said late on Friday it had suspended Evergrande Life, the insurance arm of China Evergrande Group, from investing in the stock market.

Liu Shiyu, head of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, also made a statement recently, noting that any attempt to acquire a majority stake in a listed firm using funds from questionable sources crosses the line.

The statement was seen by many as a thinly-veiled allusion to a slew of high-profile A-shares acquisitions. In addition, as the year end approaches, profit-taking by many investors also dragged down the index, analysts said. Endi