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Legislature likely to pass bill on debtor disclosure

The legislature is likely to approve today an amendment allowing banks to disclose the names of heavy bad-debt borrowers after Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) yesterday agreed to move it up the legislative agenda.

"Moving the bill up from No. 23 to No. 3 [on the agenda] shouldn't be a problem," Wang told Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), who visited Wang to discuss the bill's progress.

Prior to the meeting with Wang, Su urged the legislature to pass the amendment to Article 48 of the Banking Act (銀行法).

Statistics over the past 10 years show that a large number of major bad debtors had left Taiwan for China, the premier said.

"Article 48 actually protects people who steal huge amounts of money and relocate to China because the government is not allowed to disclose their name. This article must be amended, so that those people will have nowhere to hide," Su said.

Based on the proposed amendment, banks will be under no obligation to keep information of their clients' loans, deposits and remittances confidential under four circumstances. One of these is when the amount of bad debt owed by a bank client exceeds NT$30 million (US$916,000), or less than NT$30 million but more than NT$10 million for a whole year.

The amendment had been put into today's legislative agenda before allegations of possible insider trading and embezzlelent at the Rebar Group began circulating, raising concerns over financial management.

The caucus whips of the Democratic Progressive Party, the People First Party and Taiwan Solidarity Union yesterday had put their signatures in support of the amendment, but the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip said it was reserving judgment on the issue.
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