Former Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying has revealed that he owns 2,000 shares of Next Digital, the parent company of Apple Daily, a stake that was valued at about HK$630 (US$81) on Friday.

Leung — often called CY in English — said he bought the shares in 2018, and he hasn’t made any further purchases or sales of the stock since then. He urged people in the market not to draw any unwarranted conclusions from the news.

Next Digital shares were last traded at HK$0.315, down 16%.

Leung had revealed he owned Next Digital shares last Wednesday, when he said that as a minor shareholder, he had asked his lawyer to follow up with the operations and financial issues of Next Digital and Apple Daily, after the former was suspended from trading. Next Digital Chief Executive Officer Cheung Kim-hung said the group’s finances were healthy and it would operate as usual.

On Tuesday, the police’s national security department issued an order barring Next Digital major shareholder Jimmy Lai from directly or indirectly exercising his shares’ voting rights, unless he obtained approval from the secretary for security.

Leung bought the minimum amount of stock available to investors as a trading unit — known as a board lot — before Next Digital changed this to 10,000 shares in May 2019. Leung did not explain the reason behind the purchase.

In 2018, Next Digital’s shares peaked at HK$0.39 early that year, hitting a low of HK$0.19 in July, according to Bloomberg data. Average daily turnover was only HK$521,700. Based on the average price of HK$0.261 in 2018, Leung’s stake would have cost HK$522.

In early 2019, Leung started to write Facebook posts naming companies that paid to place advertisements with Apple Daily in order to put pressure on them to stop doing so.

Leung was chosen as a vice chair of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in March 2017, before he stepped down as Hong Kong leader in June that year.

He was found to be a director of two companies named in Beijing’s One Belt, One Road and Greater Bay Area initiatives, just two months after he left office. He declared those interests only after media reports discovered his roles.

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