China

China has launched the biggest overhaul of its cross-border tax and capital-controls regime in decades, threatening three popular offshore brokers with at least $330 million in penalties, vowing stricter bank oversight, and ramping up private pressure on the country’s wealthiest citizens.

Hong Kong has surpassed Switzerland as the world’s largest cross-border wealth-management center for the first time, driven by a surge of investment from mainland China.

U.S. officials believe Chinese companies have been negotiating arms sales to Iran and plotting to route the weapons through third countries to disguise their origin.

China’s top financial regulator has quietly told the country’s largest banks to suspend new loans to five Chinese refiners recently sanctioned by the United States over their ties to Iranian oil, even as Beijing publicly orders companies to ignore those same U.S. measures.

China has for the first time invoked a law targeting companies that comply with foreign sanctions Beijing rejects, escalating its pushback against U.S. blacklisting of several oil refineries over purchases of Iranian crude.

China’s two-decade effort to build an international financial system anchored by its currency, the renminbi, is gaining traction as wars and Western sanctions push U.S. adversaries to seek alternatives to the dollar.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Friday sanctioned a major Chinese independent oil refinery and roughly 40 shipping firms and vessels tied to what it called Iran’s “shadow fleet,” in the latest action under a campaign Treasury has dubbed “Economic Fury.”

PricewaterhouseCoopers has agreed to pay HK$1.3 billion ($166 million) in fines and compensation to settle regulatory investigations into its audit work for collapsed Chinese property developer China Evergrande Group. 

China has rolled out tough new rules aimed at countering foreign sanctions, explicitly linking the measures to U.S. threats of secondary sanctions on Chinese banks over Iranian oil purchases and warning that further retaliation tools are likely to follow.

Hui Ka Yan, the founder of embattled Chinese property developer Evergrande, pleaded guilty this week to multiple charges including embezzlement of assets and corporate bribery, in a major milestone in the unraveling of one of China’s biggest corporate collapses.