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According to the data included in the World Investment Report 2017 and the 2016 Statistical Bulletin of China's Outward Foreign Direct Investment, the amounts of outbound direct investment (ODI) and foreign direct investment (FDI) have amounted to 196.15 billion US dollars and 133.7 billion US dollars respectively, since 2016. In 2015, China’s ODI amount first exceeded its FDI amount, while in 2016, the gap between ODI and FDI became even bigger, while China realized a net capital output under two-way direct investment for two consecutive years. In the context of Chinese enterprises increasing their outbound investment year after year, the ways in which...

EXPERT INSIGHTS 2020

Brief introduction: Huaitao Wong, Lawyer Managing Partner at IBK Financial Group, co-founder of IBKFO, director of Shanghai Thinkoo Law Firm, and member of the Shanghai Bar Association’s Merger, Acquisition and Reorganization Research Committee. With over eight years of experience as a lawyer, Mr. Wang specializes in identity-planning, family wealth protection, management and inheritance, family trusts, private foundations, and legal services related to various other financial products. Mr. Wang currently serves as legal counsel for over one hundred financial institutions at home and abroad, and provides wealthy Chinese families with wealth protection and inheritance services. Limhay, Lawyer Senior researcher at IBKFO...

EXPERT INSIGHTS 2020

The Common Reporting Standard (CRS) is already well-known within financial circles, but only a small number of people can accurately define and apply it. Therefore, before discussing the registration and management of offshore companies within a CRS environment, I shall explain in simple language what CRS means for a customer who plans to register an offshore company. A popular definition of CRS’ impact If more than 50 percent of the revenue of an offshore company comes from dividends and interest, i.e. passive investment income, information about the controller of this offshore company will be exchanged between offshore territories and the...

EXPERT INSIGHTS 2020

“There are a thousand Hamlets in the hearts of a thousand people, and there are a thousand different family offices within a thousand families.” Different families encounter distinctive problems at different stages. They have different areas of focus, so there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution. As with iPhones, they look alike, but each one of them has its own interface and software since the owners have different tastes. As we all know, Apple’s iOS system is popular thanks to its security, stability and user-friendly design. It is said that “a different profession is like a different world”, but in terms of...

EXPERT INSIGHTS 2020

Leon Mao Tolstoy: “Happy Families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” What if, as a wealthy person in today’s China, you were introduced to a legal solution which offered benefits, including the provision of a mechanism for controlling your wealth, and more specifically, how it would be dispensed to beneficiaries, years and generations into the future? This solution could be designed to preserve your wealth from external attack from creditors or from division, if there were divorces within your family.  Under this solution, the holding of your private assets would become “opaque” to outsiders, whereby your...

EXPERT INSIGHTS 2020

Haibo Xu/Dongming Liu In spite of the global economic slowdown, the export-oriented feature of the Chinese economy has constantly been reinforced. With the volatility of currency exchange rates, there is a stronger desire for idle domestic capital to be converted into foreign capital. By setting up private funds, domestic, industrial and financial capital takes an active role in cross-border mergers and acquisition, and stimulates industrial integration on both a global and a regional basis. Compared with foreign-raised private USD funds, the so-called RMB funds have international vision,and operating capability. They integrate profound government and industrial resources, and thus play an...

EXPERT INSIGHTS 2020

Catherine Le Bourgeois, Wilson Yeung The current legal framework of Hong Kong Trusts The Trust Law (Amendment) Ordinance 2013 ("the Ordinance"), which aims to modernize Hong Kong's trust laws, became effective on 1 December 2013. The Ordinance states that its main objective is to amend the Trustee Ordinance and Perpetuities and Accumulations Ordinance to extend trustees' powers in certain aspects, impose a statutory duty of care on trustees, provide for the validity of certain trusts, abolish the rule against perpetuities, and change the rule against excessive accumulations of income. The major changes include (i) extension of trustees' powers to take...

EXPERT INSIGHTS 2020

Robert Wood Trusts, holding companies, limited liability companies and various other forms of ownership are the norm for offshore clients and assets. In many jurisdictions, even personal residences are rarely held directly by those who live in them. Yet in the midst of considering offshore income and assets, the age-old joint bank account is often still present. Around the world, joint bank accounts are common between spouses, siblings, parent and child, and in many other situations. Indeed, even unrelated people may share investment or property accounts.  Across myriad situations, joint accounts allow equal access to funds but often have unclear...

EXPERT INSIGHTS 2020