Shenzhen, Guangdong province - Vanke said on Monday the company had not found any evidence so far to prove that the A&W floor it used for its decorated flats is poisonous. Results of the initial investigation will be released on Feb 27.

On Feb 16 a post in an online forum, which got widespread coverage, said that in more than 10 cities, over 10,000 flats decorated by Vanke – one of the leading real estate companies in China - had used laminate wooden flooring (called A&W) that contained excessive levels of formaldehyde. It also uploaded evidence of the floor supplier offering bribes to a member of Vanke's staff surnamed Song.

The poster said her name was Li Xiaoyan, who was deputy editor-in-chief of a furnishing magazine, and had left a cell phone number for making contact.

Tan Wenji, Vanke's Board Secretary said at a press conference on Monday afternoon that Vanke has stopped purchasing from A&W, the foreign owned floor manufacture, which has one company in Shanghai and one in Suzhou, and sealed up all the A&W floors for investigation as soon as they found out about the story one hour after the article had been posted.

According to him, the samples are from the company's off cuts after each floor installation, and ones that have been purchased but not yet installed. He said the first batch of A&W floor samples had been sent to Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision. The result will come out on Feb 27, while investigation of all the samples will be finished in early or mid March.

"You cannot say the floor was poisonous before the results come out," he said about the mass reports of "Vanke poisonous flooring" last week.

Tan continued that emergency internal investigations after the event showed the employee named Song mentioned in the post was not involved with bribery.

He also said Vanke had tried many times to contact the cell phone number left in the article but it was shut down.

Zhou Weijun, Vanke's deputy president in charge of purchasing said the group purchased A&W laminate wooden flooring of about 131 million yuan between 2008 to 2011, which provided around 23 percent of all floors it purchased for its decorated flats, and they had been installed in its 29 properties in 16 cities across the country including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Yu Liang, president of Vanke, said if the result turns out the floors were indeed not suitable, the company would change all floors for the landlords concerned in this event, as well as compensate them for all their losses.