THE government will speed up drafting regulations on overseas investment, as investment in sectors such as property has shown irregularities, a senior Commerce Ministry official was quoted as saying Tuesday.

    Zhou Liujun told news agency China News Service there were many risks underlining the huge surge in overseas investment this year, and some firms were making “big-volume” deals abroad even as they faced mounting debt that exceeded their total assets.

    “In the property sector, overseas investment has shown unreasonable tendencies,” Zhou was quoted as saying.

    He said the proposed regulations were being studied and their content was “very rich,” but he did not elaborate or give any details.

    From January to November, China’s nonfinancial outbound direct investment (ODI) soared 55.3 percent to 1.07 trillion yuan (US$153.96 billion) from a year earlier. The country’s nonfinancial outbound direct investment is likely to hit 1.12 trillion yuan in 2016 and foreign direct investment into China will total 785 billion yuan, Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng said Monday.

    China recently announced a string of measures to tighten controls on money moving out of the country, including closer scrutiny of outbound investments. The moves were made as the yuan skidded to an 8-1/2 year low and China’s foreign exchange reserves fell to the lowest level in nearly six years.

    But Wang stressed that China hadn’t changed its policies and principles towards overseas investment, which was to encourage capable Chinese firms with suitable conditions to “go out” and invest.

    For all of 2015, the ministry reported nonfinancial ODI of 735.1 billion yuan, and FDI of 781.4 billion yuan.(SD-Agencies)