Bloomberg News prevented its own reporters from following up on a 2012 article probing China’s wealthy ruling class due to worries that Beijing would kick the company out of the country and deprive it of lucrative business, the NPR reported on Monday.

A further probing article would “invite the Communist Party to… completely shut us down and kick us out of the country,” Bloomberg founding editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler said in a 2013 recording obtained by NPR.

The recording was of a conference call with members of Bloomberg’s China-based investigative team, which had been working for more than a year on a story exposing corruption connected to Chinese President Xi Jinping and his family .

Bloomberg’s major source of revenue is the sale of expensive financial terminals, which is very dependent on access to the Chinese market.

At the time of the recordings, Winkler publicly denied he was preventing the development of the story due to fears of Chinese repercussions, saying he had not killed the stories.

But Bloomberg News successfully silenced the reporters involved and even tried to keep quiet the spouse of one of the reporters.

After Bloomberg published the first story by its team of reporters exposing the scandal in China, the company was threatened by Chinese authorities, and its reporters were forced to move to Hong Kong, which they thought would be a safer location.

But the reporters continued the probe and senior news editors in New York City expressed excitement about the findings as a foundation for another expose before top executives in the company ordered the journalists to stop pursuing the story,