Listen Duration: 6 minutes 9 seconds 6 m Listen Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Gerard Ryle speaks to Asia Pacific ( Asia Pacific ) Download 2.8 MB An investigative journalism organisation has revealed secretive offshore tax havens used by China's well-connected elite to hide their wealth.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has unearthed companies owned by relatives of top Chinese leaders, with information culled from 2.5 million leaked documents.

Director of the consortium, Gerard Ryle, has told Radio Australia's Asia Pacific program the use of secret offshore holdings opens up the potential for corrupt practices.

"What we have revealed is a secret offshore holdings of families of the leaders of China," he said.

"They're extensively using secrecy havens, and when you have secrecy you have the potential for wrongdoing.

"One of the reasons people use offshore tax havens is to hide their wealth and to do things that they don't want people to know about."

The ICIJ cited nearly 22,000 offshore clients from mainland China and Hong Kong, including relatives of president Xi Jinping, former president Hu Jintao, former premiers Wen Jiabao and Li Peng, as well as late leader Deng Xiaoping, the man credited with opening up China's economy in the 1980s.

Members of China's National People's Congress, heads of state-owned enterprises and some of the country's wealthiest men and women were also included in the report, including real estate mogul Zhang Xin, co-founders of Chinese Internet giant Tencent, Pony Ma and Zhang Zhidong, and China's richest woman, Yang Huiyan.

In addition, the confidential files leaked to ICIJ include the names of 16,000 clients from Taiwan.

Offshore entities set up with help from top firms

While the ICIJ's report does not suggest China's leaders have knowledge of the accounts, it has revealed the tax advantages and anonymity available to the country's elite, with the cooperation of many top international top banks.

Ninety per cent of the mainland Chinese clients set up offshore entities in the British Virgin Islands, often with the help of Western firms such as UBS and PricewaterhouseCoopers, the investigation said. Seven per cent were established in Samoa and three per cent in other areas.

"The information comes from two firms that provide offshore services for big accountancy firms and banks," Mr Ryle said.

"We found initially when we first got the documents that the vast majority or at least the largest portion of names came from the greater China region."

Reports slammed as 'smear' campaigns

In 2012, the New York Times and Bloomberg news agency published investigations into the vast wealth said to have been amassed by family members of Mr Wen and Mr Xi.

Both news organisations have since had their websites blocked in China, and authorities have denounced the reports as an effort to "smear" China's leadership.

The ICIJ website was in turn blocked within China on Wednesday.

Mr Ryle says the organisation will publish the names of all identified members on its online search database.

"What we're going to do now is publish the 40,000 names, these are the names from greater China," he said.

"We're going to publish them in the same way as we've been publishing information from the rest of the world.

"We've actually setup a database where people can go in publicly and search a name and an entity that's linked to that person. And we think that that will bring more stories out."

Asked if the government planned to follow up on the report, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said "the logic of the article is unconvincing, which cannot but raise questions of ulterior motives".

"What I want to point out is, the clean will be proved clean and the dirty will be proved dirty," Mr Qin said.

ABC/AFP