Wednesday, January 22, 2014



Explosive

That's the only way to describe the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' data-dump on the Chinese "Communist" elite's use of offshore tax-havens:

Close relatives of China’s top leaders have held secretive offshore companies in tax havens that helped shroud the Communist elite’s wealth, a leaked cache of documents reveals.

The confidential files include details of a real estate company co-owned by current President Xi Jinping’s brother-in-law and British Virgin Islands companies set up by former Premier Wen Jiabao’s son and also by his son-in-law.

Nearly 22,000 offshore clients with addresses in mainland China and Hong Kong appear in the files obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Among them are some of China’s most powerful men and women — including at least 15 of China’s richest, members of the National People’s Congress and executives from state-owned companies entangled in corruption scandals.


The Chinese elite is estimated to have stolen between 1 and 4 trillion US dollars from their people over the past decade, and much of it seems to be ending up in the British Virgin Islands. Meanwhile, 300 million Chinese live on less than US$2 a day. That's not a recipe for political stability; instead its more like ancien regime France. And if China doesn't crack down on corruption and restore some measure of equality, its "red nobility" may suffer the same fate.