China will tighten screening of overseas investment projects amid growing concern about capital outflows and acquisition risks, officials from the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), and two other government departments said. They reiterated China will stick to its strategy of “going out”, which has been boosted by changing from an approval system to one of collecting records from companies investing overseas. Now, checks are being introduced in the push to combine high-quality offshore assets with precautions against risks. The country’s investments in global markets in the non-financial sector surged by 53.3% year-on-year to reach USD145.96 billion between January and October, already surpassing the total for 2015 of about USD121.4 billion, data from the Ministry of Commerce show. But there are concerns about money outflows as China tries to keep money from illegally leaving the country, given the current global business atmosphere. “We have found certain companies and individuals transferred their assets illegally through investment activities in overseas markets in the past 12 months,” Guo Song, Director General of the Capital Account Management Department of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) said. The Administration conducted special checks for illegal capital outflows in the first six months of the year and found 2,335 leads involving a total of USD8.4 billion. The focus will be on state-owned enterprises (SOEs), as companies from the private sector have more independence to make their investment decisions in global markets, the China Daily reports. Shanghai’s municipal foreign exchange authority told bank managers in the city that all overseas payments under the capital account of more than USD5 million would have to be submitted to Beijing for special clearance before proceeding. A separate document seen by the South China Morning Post said to be the minutes of a central bank meeting on cross-border capital controls, said that from now until September of next year, Beijing would ban deals involving investment of more than USD10 billion; mergers and acquisitions (M&As) valued at more than USD1 billion outside a Chinese investor’s core business; and foreign real estate deals by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) involving more than USD1 billion.