Taishin Financial OK to hire of Gibb

The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) finally gave the green light last week to Taishin Financial Holding Co's (台新金控) appointment of Greg Gibb as its chief operations officer, the company said yesterday.

Gibb is the former managing partner of global consultancy McKinsey & Co Inc's Taipei branch.

"We obtained the approval last Friday. The appointment of Gibb took effect straight away," Carol Lai (賴昭吟) chief financial officer of the nation's second-largest financial group, said in a telephone interview yesterday.

"We hired Gibb for his strength in strategy and deep knowledge of financial institutions and the market," Lai said.

Gibb has actually been on board since Taishin Financial Holding's board approved his appointment at the end of last month, Lai said.

His appointment has been well received by the investors, she said.

The commission's approval came one month after Taishin Financial filed an application. The company had to provide additional information about Gibb's qualifications several times because the labor union of smaller rival First Financial Holding Co (第一金控) raised conflict-of-interest questions about him.

The union said that in his job at McKinsey, Gibb had advised First Financial on its restructuring plan and so the union was worried that he might leak confidential information about First Financial to his new employer.

While at McKinsey Gibb had also advised Taishin Financial twice: on the consumer bad debts issue in the middle of last year and on the company's establishment back in 2002.

The commission said that in order to avoid lawsuits, Gibb and Taishin Financial would have to exercise caution to prevent the use of confidential information he might have obtained in his old job.

Meanwhile, Taishin Financial is mulling a one-time write-off of its banking arm's loss from the sale of NT$15 billion (US$46 million) in bad debt, Lai said.

"We are seeking internal consensus on the issue and may have a final answer by the end of this month," she said.

Taishin Financial is planning to amortize the sale losses -- which could exceed NT$10 billion -- over the next five years, because of concerns about capital adequacy.

However, investors' concerns and the need to comply with international accounting standards and practices has prompted the rethink, Lai said.

She, however, was tightlipped on whether the company would seek another round of fundraising to finance the write-off, saying only that "it was too early to comment."

BNP Paribas Securities (Taiwan) Co estimated last month that Taishin Financial would need to raise NT$25 billion to NT$35 billion to alleviate problems caused by mounting consumer bad debt.

An injection of NT$31 billion in February from Newbridge Capital Inc and Nomura Group now appears inadequate after Taishin Financial wrote off its banking unit's NT$27.4 billion of bad debt, the French brokerage said.