How to skin the cat of the ‘missing tenancy agreement’ is an oft-faced challenge in the game of the Hong Kong Right of Abode Application after 7 years continuous ordinary residence by a foreign national intending permanent resident.
QUESTION
What happens if I am unable to provide copies of my tenancy agreements in support of my Hong Kong permanent residency application?
I never thought I would still be here for 7 years so I every 2 years I get rid of old documents ie, bank statements, tenancy agreements, utilities etc.
Also for years 3-7 I was living with my ex partner so the tenancy agreement was in her name or her employer’s name.
What can I do? Will utility bills be enough?
Thanks.
ANSWER
Yes, I can completely understand how in your circumstances, you have gone through a regular exercise of throwing out old, not needed documents anymore, and so, seven years down the road you find yourself needing to be able to demonstrate to the immigration department that you’ve been continuously an ordinarily resident here for those seven years, and that you can’t lay your hands on documents to begin to substantiate the actuality of your formal residence.
Well, look at it from this perspective – if you can’t come up with tenancy agreement documents, then the Immigration Department will rely on other aspects of your file to allow themselves to be satisfied that you’ve been resident in Hong Kong, notwithstanding the fact that you can’t, in your instance, come up with formal tenancy agreements because of the pattern of your life and how it was lived.
They know from your movements into and out of Hong Kong how much time that you’ve spent here. And if it’s very clear on all the facts that you have been continuously working for your employers in Hong Kong with resident visa permission, that is employment visa permissions, you’ve paid your taxes throughout those seven years and that fact has been evidenced through the submission of the copies of your tax returns for the requisite period, that any absences from Hong Kong in that time have been of a merely temporary nature and typically not long in time, then it’s easy for the Immigration Department to conclude that unless you were sleeping in a tent, effectively you’ve been laying your head somewhere in Hong Kong safe and secure throughout all of this time.
So, the Immigration Department won’t refuse your application because you can’t come up with the tenancy agreements, but because it is an integral element of the application, my advice to you would be to draw up a schedule and state effectively what your addresses were during the requisite seven years, and the time that you were in those premises. Accordingly, with a short note against each entry explaining why the tenancy agreement isn’t available. So, if you put that schedule together and perhaps you might be able to lay your hands on some other documents, utility bills or telephone bills or whatever, that can speak quite clearly to the fact or testify clearly to the fact that you were ensconced in those addresses at the relevant points in time.
Just to corroborate the explanation on your schedule; then you’ll find that the Immigration Department will usually respond positively to that, and it’ll help you solve your tenancy agreement absence conundrum. Okay, I hope you found this useful. Thanks. Bye.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
A friend of mine is looking into the idea of residing in Hong Kong. He’s a soon to be traditionally published book author in the United States, and he’s based in another country.
Well, assuming his work becomes a financial hit and reasonably well known in first world countries (not on the scale of Rowling, but I think you get what I mean), do you think he’ll find higher success with the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme?
And assuming he does get to stay in Hong Kong, since his royalties will be coming from a US based company that already deducts their share and US withholding tax, does he need to open up a company there to receive his funds, or can he just open up a Hong Kong bank account and start depositing his cheques there without having to worry about Hong Kong’s Inland Revenue Department swooping down on him?
(I take it they won’t need to since the funds are foreign-sourced, but is this really the case or am I missing something here?)
Thanks again for your time!
ANSWER
Like anything to do with the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme (QMAS), in the final analysis, your guess is as good as mine as to the chances of approvability for any particular skill set or any particular candidate. Given the circumstances surrounding the professional career of your friend, it seems to me that if he’s going to make an application under the QMAS, then it’s going to be under the Achievement-based Points Test rather than the General Point Test,sothat would require the candidate to have a significant amount of peer recognition for his accomplishments, that would suggest that if he’s had one good book, then it may not be sufficient, there could be a requirement to have a track record of publishing; also, I think I suspect depends on the nature of his writing.
So, as I say, that’s just me surmising that there is the possibility of an application under the Achievement-based Points Test; and that would be it, whether he’s going to get approved or not, as I say, your crystal ball is just as good as mine.
In terms of other applications that might be open to him, it seems to me that there probably is only the capital investment entrance scheme, which is a HKD10 million investment for residence program that takes six to eight months to complete.
If he has that level of funds and he’s prepared to lock them into qualifying investment asset classes in the HKSAR, then there’s a very good chance to get unlimited approvals under the capital investment entrance scheme, which would seem living, working, doing whatever he wish quite lawfully in Hong Kong without any further reference to his rationale for being here.
Aside from that, I can’t really envisage there any other immigration status that would be suitable for him if he’s just going to carry on writing and being a self commissioned author. So that’s about the shape of his options as regards immigration. Now in relation to your questions as regards taxation, my expertise is in immigration and not in tax, I’m afraid, so I’m not qualified to answer that question for you.
Okay. I hope you found this helpful nonetheless.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
Hong Kong is such a draw but sometimes it’s just not going to be…
QUESTION
Hi Stephen,
I am 25 Years old Indian National. I don’t have any kind of degree. I own a business from past seven years in India.
I am applying for jobs from past 4 months but in most of the cases I just get rejected since I can’t speak Cantonese or my employer is not willing to sponsor my Employment Visa.
I have a girl friend in Hong Kong who is PR. I want to shift with her but financially she is not strong enough so that she can sponsor me for Dependent Visa after marriage.
The employers are not ready to sponsor my case cause I don’t have any special talent which can be justified in front of Hong Kong Immigration Department.
I do not qualify for QMAS and lastly it is too late for me to apply for university so that I can come as a student and even if I come as a student, I fear it would be very difficult for me to support myself without a job.
It is very difficult every time to come to Hong Kong on Visitor Visa and leave country after 14 days.
I would like to know is there any special visa category under which I can shift to Hong Kong?
Someone suggested me to apply as a domestic helper or imported worker and once I am there for 2 years I would get enough time to check out other possibilities but getting a job as domestic helper or imported worker seems impossible for Indian National.
Can you please suggest me something which can sort out my issue or I should just forget about starting a new life in Hong Kong.
Please let me know.
Thank You.
ANSWER
Yes, I can understand how extremely frustrated you may be given that you principally don’t have any means for qualifying for any kind of residence visa for Hong Kong. But if you think it through, actually the policy behind the current immigration arrangements in Hong Kong for foreign nationals is designed to ensure, just like every other nation, in fact, that the brightest and the best, if you will, are able to come and contribute to Hong Kong society.
And in that regard, you know, they’re looking for certain qualities from foreign nationals who can take up residence here. And as I said, clearly, unfortunately, in your circumstances, you don’t qualify. So if life in Hong Kong is serious for you, I would suggest that you look closely to the various criteria for approval under the various immigration programs and make sure that you qualify for at least one of them.
Just turning quickly to the idea that you can become a foreign domestic helper or you can participate as imported labour well, effectively, even if you come under the supplemental labour schemeas imported labour, you’re still going to have to have a certain skill set that will be deemed not locally available in Hong Kong.
So given that you have a business background, it’s difficult to understand what might carry the day in that respect and you would still need to have a job offer; and given that foreign domestic helper visas are based on a contract that is bilaterally negotiated between the government and Hong Kong and other governments, and that India not part of that scheme, you would not be able to remain in Hong Kong as a foreign domestic helper in any event.
Sorry to say it doesn’t look very good for you, all told. But thanks for reaching out with your question and letting us know how things have been for you, it’s certainly useful to the leadership generally. Thank you.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
Being a Chinese national resident on the Mainland makes it difficult to relocate to Hong Kong…
QUESTION
I’m a British and Australian citizen (dual nationality) living in Australia and I have a mainland Chinese girlfriend, presently living in China.
We wish to move to Hong Kong to live together and I want to start a technology business there.
I have about $300K HKD cash available and my Chinese girlfriend has probably four times that available too.
We both have investment assets that could be accessed fairly readily which are larger than the cash levels we have available.
My goal is that once I get the business legally registered and start operating, to generate enough revenue to then get into the Hong Kong science park and establish proper offices, start hiring, and grow the business etc.
How do we go about doing this in the best way possible?
ANSWER
On the face of it, this question would appear to beg a relatively straightforward answer. Unfortunately, because your girlfriend is presently a PRC national who’s resident on the mainland, the opportunities for her to relocate to Hong Kong are quite limited in so much as there will have to be a certain amount of, in a sense, fancy footwork for both of you to be able to achieve your ultimate objective, which is for you to be both working and invested in your own enterprise, and clearly carrying on the lives that you wish to carry on together after your relocation to Hong Kong.
So what I propose to do is to break this answer down into the opportunity for you and then the opportunity for your girlfriend, and then try and tie it all together with a series of options that might make sense for you in all the circumstances.
But, just to be clear from the very get go, the idea of her being able to simply relocate to Hong Kong and join in the business that you’re planning to establish as you relocate yourself from Australia is not going to happen. It’s going to have to be done in a roundabout way.
So here we go. Effectively, from the information that you supplied to me, it would appear that you have all the necessary resources to successfully complete an application for a business investment visa. Now, I don’t propose to labour the requirements for approval under the business investment visa because appended to the end of this post is another piece of content that exists on our website that talks in quite some considerable detail about the requirements to pass the approvability test for a business investment visa.
But I’ll just take it as given that you’re in a position to do that, so then we can move on to the situation as regards your girlfriend. So here the options for you are:
Firstly, you can essentially if you’re in a loving committed life partner relationship, you can get married. And then after you have secured your own business investment visa for Hong Kong, you can sponsor her for a dependent visa and she’ll be able to move from China to live with you in Hong Kong. And at the point of activating that dependent visa, she will be lawfully employable and she’ll be able to join you in your new enterprise. So, that’s available to you if I say you’re in a loving, committed life partner relationship and you’re not just doing it for immigration purposes.
The second option is for her to apply under the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme if she is a person of exceptional talent, both academic and professional. I haven’t seen her CV so I don’t know much or if indeed anything about her background and for all practical purposes, whether, you know, she’s a candidate for this programme. But, the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme (QMAS) is an option for her even though only 23% of all applications in the QMAS get approved, 77% of those approvals do go to mainland Chinese nationals who are resident on the mainland.
So, that’s an option if she’s got a sterling CV. Be aware though, it’s a hell of a black box. You’re not going to know what her chances of approval are until the selection committee announced the results. It’s really very, very opaque. You’ve got no ability to really understand what’s going on in that deliberation process and it’s going to take between twelve and 15 months for that process to play itself out.
So you’re still going to have quite a weight ahead of you. Even if such an application does go on to represent approval for her, she could then, on the other hand, apply for a student visa in Hong Kong and undertake a course of study at a recognised tertiary education institute, either at Bachelor level or at any Master’s level if she’s already completed a bachelor’s degree in China. Now the advantage of this is that effectively she would be able to move to Hong Kong almost straight away. She would complete her course of study and for the purposes of this example I’ll suggest that it’s a master’s degree.
But she’ll complete her master’s degree in one year and at the end of that year she will be able to secure a one year in a sense unlimited working visa under the Immigration Arrangements for Non-Local Graduates (IANG). And that would mean that she’d then be in a position to immediately join your firm, working for the company that you’ve established in the meantime and assuming that uh during the currency of what would have then been two years since you started the business, she got a student visa and then worked for you for one year under IANG, your business has then gone on to become uh, solidly entrenched commercial enterprise such that it can be deemed a suitable and credible sponsor.
At the end of her one year free working visa privileges under IANG, you will then be able to use your company to secure an employment visa extension for her. And assuming that your business stays in business all throughout the preceding five or six years, she’ll be able to be sponsored by that business all the way through to seven years when she’ll be able to adjust their status to permanent residency and effectively your problem goes away. So, those are the rational opportunities for her to join you in Hong Kong in a sense directly.
Another way that you might wish to consider would be to put on hold for at least twelve months your plans to relocate to Hong Kong, and then secure immigration permissions for her to be temporarily resident in Australia with you under some visa class that’s suitable in the constructs of her life and her plans for Australia while you wait out the one year period that’s required whereby; under the General Employment Policy of Hong Kong, a chinese national who has held a residence visa in a country outside of China and has lived there for a minimum period of twelve months will be able to make an application for immigration status in Hong Kong as though she were just a regular foreign national. So in that respect as though she were, as she is in your instance, an Australian or a British national. But this application must be made from outside of Hong Kong and you could then effectively make an application for both of you to secure business investment visas both of you investing into your proposed business in Hong Kong and assuming that you can pass the approvability test as I’ve detailed a little bit earlier in the answer, then you might both of you be able to secure permissions to join in that business in Hong Kong in your own right and then come to Hong Kong together and implement your business plan. But that would require, as I say, her moving from China to Australia first to be with you and to be in Australia for at least twelve months before the application for a business investment visa is made in her name.
And she would have to be outside of Hong Kong all the while that that application was being considered by the Immigration Bepartment, which as you can see from the post that I’ve included as regards the approbability test, can mean at least six months waiting time.
So no easy answers for you. There are certain pathways for you to achieve your outcome, but it’s not going to happen overnight and you may find that you’re going to have to perhaps tread a journey through to your joint lives together in Hong Kong that’s going to be a little bit around the houses before you are able to achieve what you wish to achieve. Okay, I hope you found that useful.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
What is the deal if you help out a charity on a volunteer basis whilst holding a visitor visa in Hong Kong?
Volunteer work for a charity based overseas but also operating in HK?
QUESTION
Hi Visa Geeza,
I am Canadian and I first came to Hong Kong on April under a 3 month training visa as part of a university program.
While doing my training (an internship) I met the director of an NGO that is both a registered charity in Hong Kong and a registered non-profit in Vancouver.
I ended up volunteering for the NGO after my internship for about 4.5 months while looking for a job in Hong Kong.
I volunteered for the Vancouver branch of the NGO doing remote work such as emails and social media, basically stuff that can be done anywhere.
I was a visitor in Hong Kong at the time and also traveling in Asia.
Is it considered legal for me to work for this Canadian NGO while I was in Hong Kong?
Basically I was doing remote work as a Canadian for a Canadian organization.
I just happened to be doing it on my laptop in coffee shops in Hong Kong.
Hoping you can help me!
ANSWER
This is one of those hazy situations where you’re caught between two pillars, where it is almost impossible to anticipate any kind of sensible resolution to the dilemma that you’re facing. It is quite clear under Hong Kong law that you are not allowed to take up any kind of employment in Hong Kong, paid or unpaid, without the permission of the director of immigration.
So even when you’re in a situation where you’re volunteering your time, therefore conceptually need to make an application to the Immigration Department for their permission, or at the very least, a statement of no objection to you engaging in a specified activity. The problem is that because you’re working on a volunteer basis for an NGO, it’s highly unlikely that you would have all the necessary approval criteria in play that would allow the Immigration Department to positively consider an application and go on to approve it.
Therefore, it kind of begs the question that if the Immigration Department is telling you on the one hand you need their permission, but on the other, the operating criteria for the grant of permission to be able to do that isn’t available. Because this would be such a strange situation, the Immigration Department won’t really know how to deal with it.
You’d find that your application would probably not get entertained in any meaningful sense to the extent that you could get a positive resolution within the short time span that you’d expect to stay in Hong Kong as a visitor. And, there lies the rub, because this is really all about what you are doing as a visitor in Hong Kong rather than work per se.
And, as you would expect that your visit time in Hong Kong would come to an end quite soon. If you are generally helping out remotely and you are doing some things, as you suggest, in a coffee shop at the end of a computer, would the Immigration Department find that unreasonable?
Would they object to it? Would they want to prosecute you for breach of conditions of stay? I can’t speak for the Immigration Department on what they would do, obviously, but in my experience, it just seems to me that they would probably, expect to see you leave Hong Kong and take that activity elsewhere without putting the resources to waste in trying to prove some sort of point as to what is permitted and what is not permitted activity under the visitor visa category, when clearly doing some things that are of good to both the canadian organisation and to the Hong Kong organisation, far be it from me to say that what you’re doing is lawful I would never be able to say that to you.
But by the same token, would the Immigration Department take you to task for any of this? And would they engage resources to look into providing you with express permissions, given that as a canadian citizen, you’re only going to be getting 90 days here as a visitor anyway?
I suspect nothing, really a case of, I would say, let sleeping dogs lie. But understand that the visitor visa is designed for you to come and visit. It’s not for you to engage in any kind of employment activity, irrespective of where the recipient of the contribution that you’re making to their fortunes is located.
So, sorry, a bit of a convoluted kind of non-answer to a question that I think doesn’t really have a straightforward answer, all told. But good luck nonetheless.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
The question of immigration status for mainland resident spouses of current or aspiring Hong Kong residents is a bit of a hot potato. As this PodCast answer sets out, there is a dual track system in place in the immigration system which makes for winners and losers – and for once, those with the Right of Abode miss out.
This question has been lingering for a while, but the answer remains applicable even today.
QUESTION
“My employer wishes to relocate me from our Shanghai office back to our Hong Kong office. I previously had a Hong Kong work visa from 2007-2010.
I’ve very recently been married to my mainland Chinese wife. Will the fact that she is mainland Chinese adversely affect our ability to get a work visa for myself and a spouse visa for her?
What steps can I take in order to improve the likelihood that we are approved (besides the marriage certificate, mutual bank statements, and photos showing that we’ve been together for a long time)?”
ANSWER
In recent years, PRC national mainland resident spouses who are being sponsored for dependent visas by foreign nationals living or seeking to live in Hong Kong can apply for dependent visa just like any other foreign national account. Consequently, in your circumstances, you can apply for her visa to join you as your spouse without concern in respect to the nationality and the fact that she’s resident on the mainland at the moment.
And this is contrary to the situation faced by residents in Hong Kong who have the Right of Abode, that is, their permanent residence. You see, spouses of Hong Kong permanent residents can only sponsor their mainland spouses into Hong Kong on the one way permanent system, which is subject to a daily quota and as a backlog of many, many years.
And actually this is the same for foreign national permanent residents and native Chinese permanent residents of Hong Kong alike. So, when you make your application for an employment visa to be relocated back to Hong Kong from Shanghai, you simply include your wife on the ID990B employment visa application form.
And then submit the documents to show that you’re often married, that you live together until now, and that you can financially support her. She will need an endorsement in her travel document from the local public security bureau in Shanghai as well. But after that, basically your application should be very straightforward.
And I wouldn’t anticipate that you’ll have any problems being able to relocate to Hong Kong together.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
Business visit to Hong Kong? With Hong Kong having such a liberal visa-upon-arrival regime (with more than 160 nationalities being granted permission to visit for between 7 and 180 days – depending on which passport you carry), it is understandable that there is confusion as to what is permitted activity if you are a ‘business visitor’ in the HKSAR.
This question provides an opportunity to get to the heart of this issue once and for all.
QUESTION
“Hi, Your websites are really informative. Thanks for making all this information available for free. I do have one question which I would like to have an answer for though.
I co-own and manage a small company in the UK (6 staff altogether) and we do a lot of business with one company in Hong Kong especially. Due to a contract we have just signed, I need to transfer myself to HK for up to one year in total, although I will probably travel to and from the UK several times in that period. I am trying to understand if I need to get an employment visa for Hong Kong. My business will carry on as normal in the UK (my brother and I run it together) but for all practical purposes I will be based out of Hong Kong for those 12 months.
Any advice you can offer would be really appreciated. Thank you!”
ANSWER
If you come to Hong Kong as a business visitor, the question is begged as to what is permitted activity under that immigration status. And typically business visitors must generally contain their activities to for example, attending business meetings or fact-finding discussions or this type of activity that gets to the heart of the possibility of some kind of transaction, with your counterparties in Hong Kong.
You can come for example to make sales calls to potential business partners clients, as long as whilst you’re making those sales calls you’re working for an entity that’s established outside of Hong Kong. You can come to sign contracts or conclude contracts indeed, submit formal tender proposals, and support the submission exercise through the delivery of presentations and supporting representations; you can participate in overall product orientation, you can attend short term seminars, you can oversee the installation or the packaging of goods, but you can’t actually be responsible that is, go hands on in relation to the installation or the packaging of those goods.
Likewise, it’s permitted activity to participate in exhibitions or trade fairs although it is not permitted activity to roll your sleeves up and start, for example, building the booth within the trade fair. You could assemble from a kit that you brought with you. That’s natural. But if you had to order timber locally and you needed to interact with local contractors and take responsibility for the formal building of your stand, you would need work authorisations for that. Ah, and it’s perfectly okay to come and participate in for example, litigation if you’re going to suing somebody or you’re being sued and you need to give evidence.
So in all things considered, business visits allow you to do all the kind of activities that are peripheral to commercial activity and where it can be said that you’re actually getting involved in the provision of services or your implementing activities in relation to the commercial endeavour that brought you into Hong Kong in the first place.
You’re going to need an employment visa, and this really sort of translates itself into a sort of common sense understanding, if you’re going to come for or four months at a time and you are a UK citizen and you get 180 days as a visitor, and during those three or four months you’re living in some service department and at 09:00 in the morning you’re reporting to your counterparty’s office and you’ve got a dedicated desk and you’re sitting there and you’re on the telephone and you’re preparing paperwork and you’re doing the kind of activities that actually go towards the implementation of the commercial aspect of what brought you to Hong Kong in the first place. That’s really work.
If it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck, in actual fact it’s quacking its head off, you are in fact a duck, therefore you need to have an employment visa. So, whilst there are some differences between the activities which are permitted by regulation and those that are allowed in practise, if you are going to be discharging your employment duties in Hong Kong, the type of things that you would ordinarily be doing back in the UK, albeit it’s more practical for you to be in Hong Kong on the ground doing that stuff, you need to have an employment visa.
Therefore my advice in this situation would be to not rely on the business visit category. Even though you’re going to get 180 day period of state each time you present yourself at the border, make an application for an employment visa. The Immigration Department will take into consideration all the circumstances of your case and if you’ve got a genuine contract and you’ve got a business back home that is going to continue and in fact is supporting the activities that have brought you to Hong Kong in the first place, the Immigration Department will undoubtedly grant you the employment visa.
So, make that application and don’t be tempted just to rely on the business visit category simply because practically you get it underneath a day each time you present yourself in Hong Kong at the border.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
