Taiwan accounted for the largest number of offshore clients using two firms in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) as tax havens to hide their wealth, with an estimated NT$280 billion (US$9.23 billion) being stashed overseas over the past 10 years, a report said.
A two-year investigation project by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) examined about 2.5 million leaked documents on offshore accounts from two firms in the British Virgin Islands and lists 37,000 names from Taiwan, China and Hong Kong.
Among the names — in addition to about 70,000 names from the rest of the world published in June last year — nearly 22,000 listed addresses are in China and Hong Kong, and about 16,000 from Taiwan, the ICIJ said.
ICIJ deputy director Marina Walker Guevara was quoted by the Chinese-language bimonthly CommonWealth Magazine, a partner outlet of the ICIJ, as saying that she found it intriguing why there were more people from Taiwan setting up trusts and companies in tax havens than from Hong Kong, China or Macau.
According to CommonWealth Magazine, the number of offshore clients from Taiwan of the two BVI firms was 1.35 times higher than that of Hong Kong and 1.8 times that of China.
The ICIJ allows the public to explore its Offshore Leaks Database at http://offshoreleaks.icij.org/search, which contains more than 100,000 secret companies, trusts and funds created in offshore locales such as the BVI, the Cayman Islands, the Cook Islands and Singapore, the organization said on its Web Site.
Identifying the people who play a role in an entity in the tax havens or those who help a client set up an entity is relatively difficult since their names are written in Romanized form, not Chinese characters.
However, the magazine has identified some of the clients from Taiwan — including Want Want Group (旺旺集團), Fubon Group (富邦集團), Ting Hsin International Group (頂新集團), Shin Kong Group (新光集團), King’s Town Construction Co (京城建設), Delta Electronics Inc (台達電), Standard Foods (佳格企業), Koo’s Group (和信集團), Chinatrust Group (中信集團), UDN news group (聯合報系), Daphne (達芙妮) and GSK Group (全興國際集團).
Assuming that about 70 percent of the profit earned by Taiwanese enterprises in China over the past 10 years, or NT$162.8 billion, was not repatriated and that the amount of Taiwanese investment in China is 1.4 times higher than in all other countries, CommonWealth Magazine estimated that Taiwanese enterprises have hidden NT$116.2 billion in untaxed earnings from overseas excluding China during the period.
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
INSPIRING: Taiwan has been a model in the Asia-Pacific region with its democratic transition, free and fair elections and open society, the vice president-elect said Taiwan can play a leadership role in the Asia-Pacific region, vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) told a forum in Taipei yesterday, highlighting the nation’s resilience in the face of geopolitical challenges. “Not only can Taiwan help, but Taiwan can lead ... not only can Taiwan play a leadership role, but Taiwan’s leadership is important to the world,” Hsiao told the annual forum hosted by the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation think tank. Hsiao thanked Taiwan’s international friends for their long-term support, citing the example of US President Joe Biden last month signing into law a bill to provide aid to Taiwan,
China’s intrusive and territorial claims in the Indo-Pacific region are “illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive,” new US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo said on Friday, adding that he would continue working with allies and partners to keep the area free and open. Paparo made the remarks at a change-of-command ceremony at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, where he took over the command from Admiral John Aquilino. “Our world faces a complex problem set in the troubling actions of the People’s Republic of China [PRC] and its rapid buildup of forces. We must be ready to answer the PRC’s increasingly intrusive and
STATE OF THE NATION: The legislature should invite the president to deliver an address every year, the TPP said, adding that Lai should also have to answer legislators’ questions The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday proposed inviting president-elect William Lai (賴清德) to make a historic first state of the nation address at the legislature following his inauguration on May 20. Lai is expected to face many domestic and international challenges, and should clarify his intended policies with the public’s representatives, KMT caucus secretary-general Hung Meng-kai (洪孟楷) said when making the proposal at a meeting of the legislature’s Procedure Committee. The committee voted to add the item to the agenda for Friday, along with another similar proposal put forward by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The invitation is in line with Article 15-2