Alibaba, the IOC’s exclusive worldwide partner for cloud infrastructure and services, ticketing and e-commerce platform services, had the penalty imposed by the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) of the People’s Republic of China.

The Financial Times said that the fine was set at four per cent of the Hangzhou-based group’s 2019 revenues, and that it concluded an anti-trust investigation into the company founded by Jack Ma.

In a lengthy "Letter to our Customers and to the Community", Alibaba said it accepted the penalty "with sincerity" and would "ensure our compliance with determination".

It went on: "Over the past several months, we fully cooperated with the SAMR investigation and seriously studied the Government’s policies and expectations for Internet platform economies.

"In this connection, we conducted a self-assessment of, and implemented improvements to, our internal systems while ensuring stable operation of our business.

"The penalty issued today served to alert and catalyse companies like ours.

"It reflects the regulators’ thoughtful and normative expectations toward our industry’s development.

"It is an important action to safeguard fair market competition and quality development of Internet platform economies."

The IOC must now desperately be hoping that the move draws a line under an apparent trial of strength involving Ma, one of the world’s best-known entrepreneurs, and Xi Jinping, China’s strongman-President.

This erupted into the open in the final months of 2020, when a high-profile initial public offering (IPO) of shares in Ant Group, a financial technology company also founded by Ma, was unexpectedly suspended in the wake of a meeting between the businessman and financial regulators.

At $37 billion (£28 billion/€31 billion), the Ant IPO had been expected to be the world’s biggest.

With less than a year to go before a Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Beijing which has had to be prepared in a pandemic and is proving highly controversial for a string of reasons geared to international geopolitics and human rights issues, the IOC has been obliged to sit and watch while the powers-that-be of the host nation have been at loggerheads with one of Lausanne’s star international sponsors.

Alibaba has not only been working hard with the IOC to modernise Olympic merchandising and ticketing systems, its cloud technology has been quietly revolutionising the back-end of Olympic broadcasting and looks set to play a major role in minimising the number of technical staff who need to be on the ground in Tokyo for the Games this Summer.

According to the FT, the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper said the fine reflected a "normative correction for the company’s development, a clean-up and purification of the industry environment, and a strong defence of fair competition".

Alibaba has been a member of The Olympic Partner (TOP) worldwide sponsorship programme since 2017.

The deal was announced by Ma and IOC President Thomas Bach at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

It runs until 2028.