Journalists are not allowed to access personal information of directors in Hong Kong’s companies registry under new rules proposed by the government.

Under the proposed amendments to the Companies Ordinance, the usual residential addresses and the full identification numbers of company directors would be considered “protected information,” which is available only to a list of “specified persons.” They include public officers or public bodies, practicing lawyers, certified public accountants and financial institutions.

Reporters, who have long relied on the companies registry for investigative journalism, however, are not exempted. Though journalists have protested the plan to restrict data access and insisted on the public’s right to know, their concerns were missing from the section on public consultation in the legislative council brief.

According to the document submitted by the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau to the Legislative Council, the amendments will be gazetted on Friday.

The Bureau argued that the correspondence address and partial identification number, together with the name of a director and relevant information of the company, will “allow searchers to ascertain the identity of the director concerned.”

Under the rare case, where different directors share the same name and partial identification numbers, the system will provide additional digits.

The new regime will be implemented in three phases. Under the first phase, which takes effect on Aug. 23, companies may replace usual residential addresses of directors with their correspondence addresses, and replace full identification numbers of directors and company secretaries with partial ones for public inspection on their own registers.

Under the second phase, protected information will be replaced and under the third, data subjects could apply to the registry to hide their protected information from public inspection.

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