Agricultural Bank of China’s IPO will be the world’s biggest if it opts for a follow-on greenshoe placement, after it priced shares today.

Overall the IPO will raise a combined total of $19.2bn, short of ICBC’s record $21.9bn raised in 2006. However, ICBC’s record IPO included a follow-on greenshoe placement that topped up the original figure of $19.1bn. If AgBank triggers a greenshoe placement, it will raise $22.1bn, making it the largest IPO in history.

The eight year prison sentence given yesterday to the American geologist Xue Feng for spying has revived the controversy over China’s often vague secrets laws but it is also another blow to Shanghai’s ambitions to become an international financial centre.

Xue, a naturalized US citizen born in China, was convicted of spying and collecting state secrets by a court in Beijing which said that his actions had “endangered our country’s national security”. According to the verdict, he got access to documents about the geology of oil wells in China and a database with information about 30,000 oil and gas wells belonging to PetroChina, which was then sold to his employer, the consultancy IHS.