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How Do Brand New Businesses Establish Their Financial Bona Fides To Be Deemed A Suitable And Credible Sponsor For A Hong Kong Employment Visa?

September 3rd, 2024

Posted in Employment Visas, The Hong Kong Visa Geeza, Your Question Answered /


 

Your company is brand new – will ImmD buy into your intentions to sponsor a foreign national to be the first employee? 

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QUESTION

As a new company I want to hire a manager who has special talent from overseas?

How can I prove our financial capability as a new company?

ANSWER

In a completely new business situation such as we’ve got before us here, the challenge is to show that you can be a suitable and credible sponsor for the foreign national employee visa permissions so that they can start this business for you in Hong Kong. And as a new business situation, you effectively have two challenges in any kind of application like this.

The first is the normal employment visa  aprovability challenge, which is to show that that particular employee that you’re thinking of bringing in from overseas possesses special skills, knowledge and experience of value to are not readily available in Hong Kong. And that in all the circumstances of the case, those skills can’t reasonably expected to be sourced from within the local workforce.

I won’t go into that in any particular detail for the purposes of this question because it would appear on the face of it that you’ve satisfied yourself that um, this m gentleman or lady indeed are approvable in all of themselves for the work that you’re planning for them to do.

The second challenge is, because it’s a new business situation, the immigration department apply elements of the investment visa approvability test to the application. They look at the new enterprise and go on to ask, well, even if this foreign national employee is suitably qualified to do the job that’s proposed this new business, can it be said to be a suitable and credible sponsor?

Because the investment visa approvability test calls for that enterprise to show that it can make a substantial contribution to the economy of Hong Kong. So it’s a hybrid scenario when you’ve got completely new company and where the first employee is going to be a foreign national sponsored employment visa holder.

So you need to anticipate that sort of proving financial capability as such, is just one facet and that can be readily achieved by obviously showing that you’ve got cash in the bank that you’ve got some sort of legal or financial nexus with another credibly or credible and established enterprise or organisation that’s associated with that new enterprise; and more generally, within the context of the argument for approval as a whole, what I mean by this is that if you’ve got a really good story that’s very compelling, that you can support with documentation, that demonstrates that they’ve got a great reason for a new enterprise being established to support the work, that’s going to be undertaken by this particular individual, then that great story together with cash in the bank and an obvious legal or financial nexus with another enterprise.

Will all be taken together in the round, and the Immigration Department will look at it from a holistic perspective to try to grant the approval that you’re looking for, you see? So, the flip side to this is that certain foreign nationals think that you can just simply establish a limited liability company for 10 or HKD12,000, get a registered office address from your company incorporation services agent, give yourself an employment contract and then truck off down to Immigration Tower and expect the Immigration Department to look at this and say: oh, yeah, great, there is an opportunity to self sponsor yourself for immigration permissions.

Well, consequently, in any new business situation, the Immigration Department are going to look to the whole story and then apply facets of the investment visa aprovability test in addition to the employment visa aprovability test, and look at the whole scenario in the round and make the determination as to whether or not that new business situation gives an opportunity for that enterprise to be deemed a suitable and credible sponsor.

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The Hong Kong Visa Geeza (a.k.a Stephen Barnes) is a co-founder of the Hong Kong Visa Centre and author of the Hong Kong Visa Handbook. A law graduate of the London School of Economics, Stephen has been practicing Hong Kong immigration since 1993 and is widely acknowledged as the leading authority on business immigration matters here for the last 24 years.

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