China Construction Bank shares looked as if they were being flipped faster than McDonald’s burgers in Hong Kong on Wednesday. Trading volumes, excluding the big sale by Bank of America, were 10 to 12 times typical levels. This is odd. BofA on Tuesday offloaded a $7.3bn chunk of stock in the Chinese lender. The stressed American bank, with an eye to its remaining $15bn CCB holding, did the right thing by China: selling the shares to ostensibly stable investors, including China Life and Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s investment arm. So what happened?

Conspiracy theories abound; in missed market opportunities, as in war, truth is often the first casualty. Aggrieved fund managers believe they were elbowed out by the China-friendly triumvirate – Hopu Investment Management, a private equity group run by the fabulously well-connected Fang Fenglei, completes the trio. According to this tale, sufficient institutional investors had been lined up by investment banks to buy BofA’s 13.5bn CCB shares at a price of about HK$4.35-HK$4.60 a share, or a premium of between 3.5 and 9.5 per cent to the price paid by the actual buyers. If true, that would mean BofA might have left some $500m on the table. But BofA shareholders are not the only ones potentially short-changed by the deal. Shares in CCB fell 4 per cent on Wednesday, in spite of the fact that a big overhang was removed the previous day.