Bad debt account holders disclosed

Bad debt statistics * Enterprise Bank of Hualien has 678 bad loan accounts with total debts amounting to NT$3.3 billion. * Taitung Business Bank has 893 bad loan accounts with total debts of NT$3.67 billion. * The Chinese Bank has 1,247 bad loan accounts with debts totaling NT$6.97 billion.

The government's Central Deposit Insurance Corp (中央存保) publicized last night the names of account holders who have bad debts of more than NT$1 million (US$30,500) at the three local banks that have been taken over by the government.

Names these defaulted accounts -- including companies and individuals -- with The Chinese Bank (中華銀行), the Enterprise Bank of Hualien (花蓮 企銀) and the Taitung Business Bank (台東企銀) are available at the Central Deposit Insurance's Web site: www.cdic.gov.tw.

Aside names, these debtors' identification numbers (excluding the last four digits) and the amount of money they owed are also available on the Web site, the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) said.

The Enterprise Bank of Hualien has 678 bad loan accounts with total debts amounting to NT$3.3 billion. Taitung Business Bank has 893 bad loan accounts for a total of NT$3.67 billion and The Chinese Bank has 1,247 bad loan accounts for a total of NT$6.97 billion.

Bad debtors

Among The Chinese Bank's loan default accounts, Chen Yu-hao (陳由豪), former chairman of the Tuntex Group (東帝士集團), owed NT$38.4 million.

Businesses by former Control Yuan member and former Kaohsiung City councilor Chu An-hsiung (朱安雄) and his wife Wu Der-mei (吳德美), a former legislator and former Kaohsiung City councilor, incurred debts of NT$330.5 million. These included debts of NT$118.6 million in An Feng Steel (安鋒鋼鐵) and NT$211.9 million in Feng An Metal Co (峰安金屬).

The commission yesterday also released its latest statistics on credit and cash-advance cards.

While number of cards in circulation continued to slide last month, several banks still recorded high non-performing loan ratios, the data showed.

Credit, cash cards

As of the end of last month, there were 38.3 million credit cards in circulation, down 0.83 percent from November and 15.8 percent from a year ago.

The revolving credit balance totaled NT$350 billion, down 2.3 percent from November.

In the cash-advance card mar-ket, the number of active cards reached about 2 million, down 5.4 percent from November and 40.1 percent from a year ago.

The cash-card lending balance also shrank 4.1 percent to a low NT$175.9 billion last month.

Among the 46 credit card issuers, only the Bank of Taiwan (台灣銀行) and Jih Sun International Bank (日盛國際商銀) reported a moderate bad loan ratio of over 3 percent, at 3.35 percent and 3.83 percent, respectively.

As for the 24 cash card issuers, three banks had a bad loan ratio of over 8 percent -- The Chinese Bank at 10.06 percent, Bowa Bank (寶華銀行) at 30.55 percent and Taitung Business Bank at 31.53 percent. The three have suspended issuing new cards as required by the government.

In another report, the FSC said as of the end of last month, 42 local banks had issued loans of NT$17 trillion, up 1.3 percent from November. Non-performing loans totaled NT$366.1 billion, down 8.2 percent from the previous month.