Mega Financial Holding Co (兆豐金控), the nation's third-largest financial group by assets, said yesterday that the merger of its two banking units will go ahead as planned on Monday, despite the fact they are still awaiting the approval of regulators in the US and Hong Kong.
The merger between International Commercial Bank of China (ICBC, 中國國際商銀) and Chiao Tung Bank (交通銀行) into Mega International Commercial Bank Co (兆豐國際商銀) is scheduled to take effect next Monday.
The company has put off the effective date twice: first from March 27 to June 26 and then to Monday.
"We are still waiting for feedback [from regulators in the US and Hong Kong]," Mega Financial's spokesman Joseph Shieh (
"But we have no plans to delay the date again," Shieh said.
The merger deal is subject to approval from overseas financial regulators as the two banks already have outlets in those markets.
State-controlled Mega Financial's board also agreed to the appointment of 12 out of 15 new board directors for Mega International yesterday.
According to the Ministry of Finance's blueprint, Mega Financial's president Mckinney Tsai (蔡友才) will take up Mega International's chairmanship, while Chiao Tung's vice president Shiu Kuang-si (
To express its opposition to the merger, the ICBC staff union said it has bought ads to be published in major newspapers on Monday to voice their protest against the name change, citing the bank's recognized brand name in international financial markets.
Mega Financial's board did not touch on whether it will join Taiwan Business Bank's (TBB,
Mega Financial currently holds a 14.36 stake in TBB. The company said last December that it planned to buy as much as a 26 percent stake within one year.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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