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Four staffers for news service Bloomberg have alleged to The New York Times that the company has held back a damning investigation into a wealthy Chinese billionaires ties to the government, fearing the story could lead to Bloombergs eviction from the country. The plan to publish the story started to unravel in late October, the employees say, when two Bloomberg senior editors whod previously raised no objections during the editing process said that the report had no smoking gun and revealed nothing new since a previous article published in 2012. Eventually, Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief, insisted on an internal conference call that the publication would be kicked out of China if it ran the report, comparing the move to self-censorship by journalists operating from inside Nazi Germany during World War II. Bloombergs fears arent unfounded: the Times notes that its Chinese-language edition was blocked inside Chinas borders after an October 2012 report that cast then-Premier Wen Jiabao in a negative light, and the publication hasnt had a single residency visa approved for any of its journalists since then.