WASHINGTON (REUTERS, BLOOMBERG) - United States President Donald Trump on Monday (Sept 21) said his administration would not approve the sale of TikTok to Oracle Corp and Walmart Inc if China's ByteDance maintains any control.

Speaking in an interview on Fox News, Mr Trump also he indicated that he expected Chinese influence to be diluted by a future public offering of the new company.

"They will have nothing to do with it, and if they do, we just won't make the deal," Mr Trump said, referring to ByteDance, which owns TikTok.

"It's going to be controlled, totally controlled by Oracle, and I guess they're going public and they're buying out the rest of it - they're buying out a lot, and if we find that they don't have total control then we're not going to approve the deal."

ByteDance and Oracle Corp issued conflicting statements on Monday over the terms of a deal they agreed with the White House over the weekend, casting doubt over Mr Trump's preliminary blessing of the agreement.

China's ByteDance was racing to avoid a crackdown on TikTok after the US Commerce Department said last Friday it would block new downloads and updates to the app come Sunday. US officials had expressed concern that the personal data of as many as 100 million Americans that use the app was being passed on to China's Communist Party government.

ByteDance said on Monday that it will own 80 per cent of TikTok Global, a newly created US company that will own most of the app's operations worldwide. ByteDance added that TikTok Global will become its subsidiary.

Oracle and Walmart, which have agreed to take stakes in TikTok Global of 12.5 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively, had said last Saturday that majority ownership of TikTok would be in American hands.

On Monday, Oracle said ByteDance will have no ownership in TikTok Global.

Mr Trump signed an executive order on Aug 14 giving ByteDance 90 days to relinquish ownership of TikTok. Oracle's account of the deal would mean that ByteDance would be complying with that order, while ByteDance's account would represent a policy reversal for Mr Trump.

Some sources close to the deal have sought to reconcile the discrepancies by pointing out that 41 per cent of ByteDance is owned by US investors, so by counting this indirect ownership TikTok Global would be majority owned by US parties. One of the sources said the deal with Oracle and Walmart values TikTok Global at more than US$50 billion (S$68 billion).

ByteDance on Monday also confirmed plans for an initial public offering of TikTok Global. The Beijing-based firm said TikTok Global's board of directors will include ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming as well as Walmart's chief executive Doug McMillon and current directors of ByteDance. The company declined to further comment on who else would be among the directors.

Oracle and Walmart said in a joint statement last Saturday that four out of the five board of directors will be Americans.

The current plan for TikTok Global does not involve any transfer of algorithms or technologies, and Oracle will be able to inspect TikTok US' source code, ByteDance said. This is akin to US companies such as Microsoft Corp sharing their source code with Chinese technology experts, ByteDance added.

Oracle and Walmart have said all of TikTok's technology will be in possession of TikTok Global.

ByteDance also said a US$5 billion payment of taxes TikTok Global is reportedly supposed to make to the US Treasury is based on estimated income and other taxes the company will need to pay over the next few years, and has nothing to do with the deal reached with Oracle and Walmart.

Mr Trump last week said there would be a US$5 billion US education fund as part of the deal, but ByteDance has said it was not aware of this.

ByteDance owning the majority of TikTok Global and the algorithms means that ByteDance is "not out of the game" and has avoided the worst-case scenario, China's state-run newspaper Global Times said in an editorial published on Sunday.

Prof Shen Yi, a Fudan University professor, said in a separate article published in the Global Times on Monday that Mr Trump's nod to the deal "could even been seen as a reversal of US President Donald Trump's executive order issued in August" and that it was helped by a "concerted effort" by the Chinese government, ByteDance and US domestic forces.

"If the Trump administration makes more moves to block the deal, it may encounter direct checks and balances from interest groups of Wall Street."