China’s top auditor has accused one of the country’s biggest state-owned banks of exploiting investment fund structures to evade billions of RMB in taxes, reports the South China Morning Post. This comes as Beijing steps up efforts to strengthen financial compliance.
Bank of China evaded RMB 2.37 billion yuan ($348 million) in taxes by misusing preferential treatment intended for publicly offered mutual funds between April 2023 and August 2025, according to the National Audit Office’s annual report.
The bank channelled investments through two affiliated financial institutions and recruited large numbers of employees as nominal investors, each contributing between RMB 1 and RMB 100, to disguise 11 privately offered funds as public ones, the report said.