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发帖数: 10330 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/business/global/obtaining-fin
Obtaining Financial Records in China
By DAVID BARBOZA
Published: October 26, 2012
China’s political system is not very transparent, but corporate and
financial information is often readily available to the public.
Related
Thirty years of economic reform — and government policies aimed at
attracting foreign investment — have created a set of government agencies
that keep records on private corporations and their major shareholders,
including copies of resumes and government-issued identity cards.
It is this system that allows news organizations, including The New York
Times, to request and review corporate records. Although ordinary citizens
are not allowed access to the records, they can hire a lawyer or consulting
firm to request documents for a fee of $100 to $200 per company. The Times
used this process in obtaining thousands of pages of corporate documents to
review the business networks controlled by the relatives of Prime Minister
Wen Jiabao.
In many cities, the local branch of the State Administration for Industry
and Commerce, or the S.A.I.C., as it is known, provides records for
companies that are locally incorporated.
Corporate files often include details of when and where the company was
incorporated, the name of the company’s legal representative and a list of
major shareholders. There is often financial information, including a
company’s registered capital.
China recently tightened access to corporate information, possibly because
of a growing number of corporate fraud scandals, but also media
investigations into the fortunes held by the relatives of political leaders,
including the former Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai.
In Beijing, for much of this year, it has been difficult to obtain corporate
records from the local bureau of the S.A.I.C.
Still, most records remain publicly available, and beginning late last year
The Times reviewed documents obtained in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin,
Shenzhen and other cities.
The records allowed The Times to trace a network of friends and relatives of
the prime minister as they built a multibillion-dollar business empire over
the last decade, often with the aid of wealthy entrepreneurs. |
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