The founder of the Hurun Report of "China rich list", Rupert Hoogewerf, announces the release of the Shandong Rich List, a report focusing on the region's richest people on November 12, 2011. [Photo: shm.com.cn]

A list of Shandong's most wealthy citizens, released by the Hurun Research Institute and China Overseas Property group last week, mistakenly listed a Jiaozhou-based male billionaire as the only wealthy female individual included in the rankings, the Yangtse Evening News reported on Friday.

Han Huiru, President of the Qingdao East Steel Tower Stock Company, was mistakenly announced as the only woman included in a list of 59 wealthy individuals with assets over 2 billion yuan (US$315 million).

The newspaper report also said that when the Hurun Research Institute counted the total number of Qingdao's wealthy individuals they neglected to include Han Huiru, but Jiaozhou is within the Qingdao's municipality.

Another newspaper, the Peninsula Metropolitan News, said a lack of familiarity with the eastern Chinese province caused these mistakes in the Hurun Report's first list of most wealthy people in Shandong.

According to the list, 33,000 Shandong locals own a fortune of exceeding ten million yuan, making up 3.4% of the country's total. And there are 1900 billionaires based in Shandong, making up 3.2% of the nation's total.

It also showed that the 4.84 billion yuan owned by billionaires in Shandong on average, was one billion yuan lower than the national average of billionaires across China.

Meanwhile, four local companies based in Linyi city of Shandong Province told the media that they don't take the list seriously and the institute's acts of putting them into the list of richest enterprises are not authoritative and void since they hadn't been informed by the Hurun Research Institute that it was publishing this information.

Similar errors were found in other lists compiled by Hurun, including its annual China Rich List published in September. Several media reports suggested that the earlier mistakes occurred because the publisher rushed to compile the list, with Forbes magazine publishing its China Rich List around the same time.

The Hurun Research Institute began issuing the "China rich list" in 1999 and its reports were thought to be authoritative in tracing the changes in the rankings of the richest individuals.