Offshore assets of China's elite revealed in leaked records

[Newsjock]

Source: CBC News

Close relatives of China's top leaders have used secretive offshore companies in tax havens that helped shroud the Communist elite's wealth, according to a massive cache of leaked financial records, posing a formidable challenge for President Xi Jinping, the country's avowed anti-corruption leader.

The confidential files include details of a real estate company co-owned by Xi's brother-in-law, as well as British Virgin Islands corporations set up by former premier Wen Jiabao's son and son-in-law, plus dozens of more cases of people tied to high-level officials.

The discovery could incense ordinary citizens in China, where senior Communist officials used to enjoy a modestly better living but nothing close to the extravagant wealth required to stash money offshore, said Fred Bild, Canada's ambassador in Beijing from 1990 to 1994. "Now, the income gap between the elite and the masses is huge.... You have hundreds of millions of people that are still living on very low income and they will be outraged."

The revelations are the latest from the huge trove of documents leaked to the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and first reported on last April in partnership with media outlets worldwide.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/offshore-assets-of-china-s-elite-revealed-in-leaked-records-1.2504987

[blm]

1. Bush Family has tons of wealth stashed from their 4 decade alliance with Chinese elite.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FE21Ad01.html

The Bush family: Middle Kingdom rainmakers
By Zach Coleman

HONG KONG - George Herbert Walker Bush arrived in Beijing 30 years ago as the official United States representative to China with one goal above all else: expanding his buddy list.

"My hyper-adrenaline, political instincts tell me that the fun of this job is going to be to try to make more contacts," he wrote in his first diary entry. "And it is my hope that I will be able to meet the next generation of China's leaders - whomever they may be. Yet everyone tells me that that is impossible."

Bush Sr, already a champion networker, wasn't to be denied. In a final triumph at the end of his stay, Deng Xiaoping, then vice premier, threw a farewell lunch for Bush Sr and his wife.
"You are our old friends," said Deng, according to a Chinese government website. "You are welcome to come back anytime in the future."

Bush Sr and his relatives have turned that open invitation into a family franchise over the years, setting themselves up as gatekeepers between lucrative business opportunities created by the opening up of China's economy and the US corporate and political establishment. If Iraq is the place where the Bush men fight once they leave the oil fields of Texas, China is where they have made money.

China policy has been a hot-button issue in US presidential campaigns for more than half a century. This time around, many politicians are linking US job losses to the country's exploding trade deficit with China, leaving the family trade in promoting US-China commerce with the potential to embarrass President George W Bush in his 2004 re-election drive.

Bush Sr and his brother Prescott both lowered their profile in the family business last year. Yet the Bushes' business suddenly hit the headlines again in November, when documents and testimony from the divorce trial of the president's brother Neil showed that he had signed a contract to receive US$400,000 a year from Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing, a Chinese company co-founded by a son of former president Jiang Zemin, in return for business information and advice. Fair enough, but Neil Bush has no background in technology. His brother's administration, however, is leaning on Beijing to reduce tax discrimination against imported semiconductors. >>>>>>>>

[JDPriestly]

4. That explains a lot!

[blm]

5. GHWBush/Jackson Stephens made deals with Chinese industrialists to move US manufacturing

base to China back in the 70s. Stephens put Walmart on the table. That was this nation's first giant step taken on the road to global fascism.

[bemildred]

2. Awesome. nt

[Jesus Malverde]

3. China's Elite Wealth in Offshore Tax Havens, Leaked Files Show

China’s elite, including the brother-in-law of President Xi Jinping, have used secretive offshore companies that helped hide wealth in tax havens, including the British Virgin Islands and Samoa.

That’s according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in Washington, D.C. The group, whose website is now blocked in China, worked with reporters from Europe, North America, and Asia, sifting through leaked files from two offshore funds, Singapore-based Portcullis TrustNet and Commonwealth Trust Limited in the British Virgin Islands.

The documents, which are part of a larger cache of 2.5 million files obtained by ICIJ and analyzed with its media partners, provide information on nearly 22,000 offshore clients with addresses in Hong Kong and mainland China. Another 16,000 or so come from Taiwan, with the remainder from countries around the world.

“By some estimates, between $1 trillion and $4 trillion in untraced assets have left [China] since 2000,” says a story on the leaked files published on the group’s website.

snip

Who along with Credit Suisse has been helping hide the wealth? The audit firm now known as PricewaterhouseCoopers helped incorporate more than 400 offshore entities for clients from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, while UBS (UBS) did so for more than a 1,000 customers from the same three markets, according to ICIJ. “Western banks and accounting firms play a key role as middlemen in helping Chinese clients set up trusts and companies in the British Virgin Islands, Samoa and other offshore centers usually associated with hidden wealth,” the story says.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-22/chinas-elite-wealth-in-offshore-tax-havens-show-leaked-files

One facet of the symbiotic relationship between Chinese communists and American corporate titans.

[Jesus Malverde]

6. ChinaLeaks: Exposé on Chinese elite’s offshore accounts comes at sensitive time

Family members of Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping, along with Tencent billionaire and China's richest woman, are among 20,000 people in Hong Kong, the mainland and Taiwan whose offshore holdings have been exposed

Relatives of at least five current and former members of China’s top leadership have been exposed as having offshore accounts, as part of a revelatory report by investigative journalists.

The leak, part of a package of 2.5 million files obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, points to nearly 22,000 offshore clients with addresses in mainland China and Hong Kong and 16,000 offshore clients from Taiwan.

"China has become a leading market for offshore havens that peddle secrecy, tax shelters and streamlined international deal-making,” the report said. “Every corner of China’s economy, from oil to green energy and from mining to arms trading, appears in the ICIJ data.”

While offshore accounts do not imply illegal behaviour per se, the report comes at a crucial moment in China’s ongoing debate on the wealth amassed by family members of China’s top leaders.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1410840/chinaleaks-chinas-elites-offshore-accounts-exposed-unprecedented

[Jesus Malverde]

7. This is the organization that leaked the records...

http://www.icij.org/offshore