Head of wealth firm thought to have absconded resurfaces - Chinese media

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - The chairman of a wealth management firm in China who police suspected had vanished with about 1 billion yuan ($154 million)of investor funds has resurfaced, denying he ran off with the money and saying he was on vacation, state media reported.

Police in the city of Hangzhou had launched a search for Yang Weiguo after the company he leads as chairman, Wangzhou Group, last week said he was missing, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Sunday.

On Tuesday, however, a state-run news website in the western region of Xinjiang reported he told friends via the messaging app WeChat he had been relaxing in Xinjiang since mid-April, pondering the difficulties the company faced, and had turned off all forms of communication.

It quoted a text message it said Yang had sent his friends on Monday saying he was heading to the police station and might be incommunicado for a while.

Other Chinese news outlets quoted a brief video showing Yang saying he'd be "right back".

Calls to the Shanghai headquarters of Wangzhou Fortune did not connect, and calls to the group's main office in Beijing were not answered. It was not possible to contact Yang.

The case is the latest scare to hit China's risk-laden shadow banking sector, which has seen a rise in fraud cases in the past few years as the economy slows and retail investors with limited options are lured into dodgy schemes by promises of high returns.

More than 20,000 people had invested some 2.2 billion yuan in Wangzhou Group subsidiary Wangzhou Fortune, which has dozens of branches around China, the Xinhua report on Sunday quoted police as saying. Investors started reported "problems with the company's cash flow" last week, it reported.

($1 = 6.5 yuan)

(Reporting by John Ruwitch; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Nick Macfie)