This paper examines whether a government can play an important role in determining a firm’s related party transactions associated with tunnelling. Through the lens of political turnover in 31 Chinese provinces for 2000-2018, we show that political turnover is negatively associated with state-owned enterprises’ (SOEs’) related party transactions (RPTs) but has no impact on non-SOEs’. Political turnover engenders uncertainty to SOEs, which curtail tunnelling-related RPTs. We identify two channels – corruption and policy-induced RPTs – leading political turnover to reduce RPTs. Corruption RPTs fall more significantly in highly corrupt provinces and before the 2012 anti-corruption campaign. Policy RPTs of SOEs with delisting risk and in high public debt provinces decrease considerably. Financially constrained firms, older officials and within-province appointments diminish the impact of political turnover on RPTs. On average, the fall in RPTs starts a year before a political turnover and ends a year after.

Using a sample of China’s listed private firms we investigate the relationship between control-ownership wedge, bank connections and collateral requirement. We find that while control-ownership wedge relates to more pledged collateral, it is mainly the firm’s bank connections rather than its political connections that reduce the collateral requirement and weakens the positive relationship between the control-ownership wedge and collateral. We furhter find that the split-share structure reform and regions with high lender competition also require less collateral and weaken the positive relationship between the control-ownership wedge and collateral. We argue that in an emerging market where legal protection for creditors and investors are weak and relationship is prevalent, bank connections is a substitute for collateral through mitigating the information asymmetry and agency concerns by creditors, which has been further exacerbated due to the tunnelling risk by the controlling shareholders.