Chinese dominate list of people and firms hiding money in tax havens, Panama Papers reveal

Hong Kong and mainland China top the global list of people and companies hiding money in secretive offshore tax havens, according to the Panama Papers database made public by a group of global investigative journalists on Tuesday.

Together the two jurisdictions accounted for nearly one in four individuals or parties around the world who established the 366,000 overseas shell companies listed in the database. The Panama Papers exposed 214,000 of them, and the rest were named in an earlier exposé in 2014.

Hong Kong alone contributed almost 26,000 individuals and entities, or 10 per cent of the total, while the mainland added 33,300. They were followed by Taiwan, with 19,600 people or companies involved.

Most of them were not previously known to be operating offshore companies administered by Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm from which 11.5 million documents were leaked.

Hongkongers owned 10 per cent of the offshore firms, or 51,000, a figure only surpassed by the British Virgin Islands itself.