In light of a streak of banking scandals this year, Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) yesterday said that the commission intends to impose penalties next week on companies that have failed to meet corporate governance requirements.
The list of companies is likely to include SinoPac Financial Holdings Co (永豐金控) — which has been plagued by infractions in its banking, leasing and securities brokerage units — as well as the state-run lenders Bank of Kaohsiung (高雄銀行) and First Commercial Bank (第一銀行) for their participation in a syndicated loan to finance troubled Ching Fu Shipbuilding Co’s (慶富造船) contract to build minesweeper ships for the navy.
Koo declined to provide further details, as the commission is finalizing its assessment of companies’ performance against corporate governance metrics.
Improving corporate governance has been the commission’s priority, and that it would adopt a “carrot and stick” approach to regulating companies, Koo said at a forum held by the Taiwan Insurance Institute in Taipei.
PRINCIPLES
However, Koo said that the Stewardship Principles for Institutional Investors (機構投資人盡職守則) have received little attention from local financial companies.
Since the principles were launched by the Taiwan Stock Exchange in June last year, only about 9.8 percent of insurers, 2.6 percent of banks and 3.1 percent of securities brokerages in Taiwan have subscribed to them, Koo said.
The principles are designed to encourage financial institutions to leverage their expertise, size and influence and carry out their fiduciary duties by participating and voting in shareholder meetings of investee companies, and engaging in dialogue with management.
Agreeing to the principles is especially important for financial companies, as they invest with the public’s money and must be subject to higher governance standards than companies in other industries, Koo said.
The stewardship principles are an important tool to help companies build a culture of ethics and compliance, as external pressures from regulators alone cannot safeguard the interests of the investing public, Koo added.
Koo said companies on the Taiwan Corporate Governance 100 Index have on average yielded 35.45 percent returns since June 2015, outperforming the 29.55 percent gain posted by the TAIEX.
ROBUST GROWTH
The nation’s insurance industry saw robust growth throughout this year, Taiwan Insurance Institute chairman Kuei Hsien-nung (桂先農) said.
In the first 10 months of this year, life insurance companies posted NT$112.1 billion (US$3.73 billion) in pretax profits, 17 percent higher than in the same period last year, while total premium collections rose 13.4 percent to NT$2.78 trillion, Kuei added.
General insurers saw pretax profits rise 13.4 percent to NT$13.3 billion, with total premiums gaining 7.4 percent to NT$130.3 billion, Kuei said.
Kuei said he is upbeat about further growth for insurers as regulators continue to ease controls on investments in the government’s “five plus two” innovative industries program, which could help cut reliance on overseas investments and tackle the challenges of Taiwan’s aging population and shrinking workforce.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained