Asia Tax Bulletin – Winter 2022

The Winter 2022 edition of the Asia Tax Bulletin covers many different tax developments in ASEAN, Greater China, Japan, Korea and India including important updates such as:

• PRC's tax reliefs to facilitate debt settlements in the country.
• Hong Kong's tax incentive for family-owned investment funds.
• India's case law ruling that beneficial ownership is not required under India's tax treaty with Mauritius in order to still enjoy the capital gains tax exemption under the treaty and Indonesia's Harmonisation Law, to name just a few.
• Hong Kong's and Malaysia's new tax rules for foreign sourced investment income, which were prompted by the European Union's threat to otherwise put both jurisdictions on its Blacklist of Tax Havens, would have had serious economic repercussions. 
  • Hong Kong's proposed law, with a few changes, took effect from 1 January 2023. The new tax rules represent a profound change in the way Hong Kong taxes foreign investment income.
  • On 29 December 2022, Malaysia added the requirement to have sufficient economic substance in Malaysia in order to enjoy tax exemption on foreign dividends received in Malaysia, which surprised the local business community. The conditions for tax exemption have retroactive effect to 1 January 2022. It will be interesting to watch for transactions which occurred prior to 29 December 2022, how the IRB can enforce a condition which taxpayers could not have been aware of.

These and other news items are discussed in this edition. Please read the Bulletin from the links below: