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BEIJING, November 1 (TMTPOST)— Hong Kong-listed shares of Tencent Holdings Ltd settled 10.6% higher at HK$227.40 on Tuesday, when the Chinese tech giant’s biggest shareholder dismissed recent report about possible stake sales.

Source: Visual China

The article published on October 31 by Asian Tech Press is “speculative and untrue”, Prosus, a Dutch technology investment company, clarified in a premarket statement on Tuesday. The article claimed that a group led by CITIC, a major Chinese state-owned investment firm, is in talks with Naspers to buy all of Tencent shares owned by the South African company via its unit Prosus. Boards of both Naspers and Prosus reiterate their continued confidence in Tencent"s long-term prospects, and continue to believe that the share repurchase program is in the best interests of these companies as well as their shareholders, according to the statement.

Naspers and Prosus announced on June 27 that they were going to sell Tencent shares orderly to fund a long-term open-ended buyback program, which would run as long as elevated levels of the trading discount to their underlying net asset value persist. In its latest filing about the buyback development, Prosus disclosed it holds a 27.99% stake in Tencent worth of US$70 billion at current price, after selling 1,115,000 shares of the WeChat owner on September 8. Prosus has reduced more than 3.9 million shares worth of HK$1.55 billion in the first half of the year, Hong Kong Economic Times, the local paper cited a filling prior to the September sales.

In Tuesday’s statement, Prosus said it continues with its repurchase program announced in June, which is funded by the sale of small numbers of ordinary Tencent shares in regularly and in an orderly manner.

Tuesday saw another news went viral on Chinese social media that Beijing has formed a committee to assess scenarios on how to exit Covid Zero, which spurred the benchmark index of Hong Kong stock market jumped as much as nearly 7%. Hang Seng Index closed 5.2% higher after paring some of gains as the Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said he was unaware of the committee.