‘30% of foreign investors from tax havens’
About 30 percent of foreign investors in Korea are from overseas tax havens, a lawmaker said Tuesday.
Citing data from the Financial Services Commission and the Korea Customs Service, Rep. Park Kwang-on of the main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy (NPAD) said that the number of corporate or individual foreign investors in Korea was 40,788 as of the end of July and that 12,240 of them had citizenship of tax havens.
Tax havens are countries that exempt foreign investors who hold bank accounts or set up companies within its territory from paying taxes.
By number of investors, the Cayman Islands ranked first with 3,162, followed by Canada and Luxembourg, which had 2,344 and 1,643, respectively. Ireland is the other country whose number of its investors in Korea registered more than 1,000, at 1,150.
In addition, their investment in Korean stocks and bonds stood at 148.2 trillion won ($125 billion) ― 116.4 trillion won for stocks and 31.8 trillion won for bonds ― and the amount accounted for 29 percent of total foreign investment, at 508 trillion won.
By amounts invested in stocks, Luxembourg was the largest investor at 26.3 trillion won, followed by Singapore’s 22.2 trillion won and Ireland’s 15.5 trillion won. The Netherlands and Canada rounded out the top five after investing 13.5 trillion won and 12.1 trillion won, respectively.
According to the lawmaker, there were 16 foreign investors, who have Korean stock investment worth more than 1 trillion won and Luxembourg had five.
Ireland, the Netherlands and Canada also had more than one investor, with their stock investment passing 1 trillion won. Ireland had three, while the other two nations had two.
“The U.S. state of Delaware is also a tax haven, but it was counted out because of an absence of statistics,” Park said.
Also, the lawmaker did not include cases of tax havens having only one investor, citing a possible leakage of their investment information.
According to Park, the United States had the largest investors of 13,639 in Korea and Japan came in second with 3, 665.
