Citing unnamed sources, The Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog said Asia's richest man is not making the investment through his Hong Kong conglomerates -- Cheung Kong and Hutchison Whampoa -- but another entity.

In October, Microsoft bought a 240-million-dollar stake in Facebook in a deal valuing the website at 15 billion dollars.

The report said the deal came through a Facebook investor, who introduced the company to Solina Chau, director of the Li Ka-shing Foundation and a major stockholder in Tom.com, a Chinese media company in which Li has an interest.

His investment could give Tom.com a leg up in possible partnerships with Facebook in China, the report added.

A spokeswoman for Hutchison Whampoa would not comment on the report.

The 79-year-old, whose fortune was valued at 23 billion dollars by Forbes, has investments across the world, including telecommunications, real estate, the Internet, shipping and retail.

Facebook and MySpace are fast-growing social networking websites that allow people to interact. Facebook has some five million members around the world and sees an average of 250,000 new users each day.

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