Chinese money setting sail for Caribbean with new bank

Hong Kong

THE global campaign against money laundering combined with the Panama Papers made the Caribbean islands of sun, sand and offshore banking a near no-go zone for the world's biggest banks.

So the British Virgin Islands has a solution: a bank to service offshore companies, many of them from China, locked out of the global banking system by HSBC Holdings Plc, Standard Chartered Plc and others. The new Bank of Asia (BVI) Ltd is to begin operating online later this year.

"We have a captive client market of all these offshore companies that have had difficulties opening bank accounts, not for their own fault but because the legacy banks have stopped want…