Ping An’s managers and shareholders must be feeling grateful to China’s painfully slow regulatory process and the cautious mandarins in Beijing who refused to approve the company’s plan to buy Fortis Investments.

Ping An agreed in March to pay €2.15bn ($3bn) for half of the asset management arm of Fortis, the Belgo-Dutch financial group which was partially nationalised on Monday with a €11.2bn capital injection from the governments of Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg.