website was also blocked on Chinese servers, and the company was unable to get visas for journalists it wanted to send to China. In 2014, Grauer told the staff at the Bloomberg Hong Kong bureau that the company's sales team had done a "heroic job" of mending relations with Chinese officials who had indicated their displeasure about the publication of the Xi revelations. He also warned that if Bloomberg "were to do anything like" the Xi story again, the company would "be straight back in the shit-box." On October 29, 2013, during a conference call, Winkler told four Bloomberg journalists in Hong Kong that the findings of their major investigation into "the hidden financial ties between one of the wealthiest men in China and the families of top Chinese leaders" would not be published. Less than a week later, a second planned article "about the children of senior Chinese officials employed by foreign banks" was also killed, according to Bloomberg employees. Unnamed Bloomberg employees quoted by The New York Times said the decision not to publish was made by the company's top editors, led by Winkler. According to one employee, Winkler said, "If we run the story, we'll be kicked out of China." When contacted by the Times, Winkler said in an email that neither story had been killed. "'What you have is untrue,'" he wrote. "'The stories are active and not spiked.'" Laurie Hays, the senior editor on the articles, "echoed" his statement. Winkler declined to discuss the conference call. The Winkler and Hays denials appeared in a story published by the Times on November 8, 2013. At a mayoral news conference four days later, Michael Bloomberg also denied the accusation. He "insisted" that Bloomberg News "did not do that; the editors said that was just not the case." Noting Winkler's response to the Times, he added, "No one thinks that we are wusses and not willing to stand up and write stories that are of interest to the public and that are factually correct." He also said that because he was mayor of New York, he was not involved in the operations of the news agency. "I've recused myself from anything to do with the company," he said. Three journalists left the company after news reports about the decision appeared --- reporter Michael Forsythe, editor and reporter Amanda Bennett, and Ben Richardson, an editor at large for Asia