Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) on Tuesday weathered his first question-and-answer session at the Legislative Yuan as he faced lawmakers on the Finance Committee and discussed his objectives.
Koo, a lawyer and former head of the Executive Yuan’s Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee, reiterated that he would preserve administrative neutrality and distance himself from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
To avoid the pitfalls of previous financial reform efforts, Koo also said he would not promote consolidation in the financial sector.
However, Finance Committee members complained that there was nothing new in Koo’s report on the aftermath of scandals at SinoPac Financial Holdings Co (永豐金控) and state-run Mega Financial Holding Co’s (兆豐金控) Mega International Commercial Bank (兆豐商銀), and that many questions about the companies’ violations remain unanswered.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator William Tseng (曾銘宗), a former FSC chairman, said that Koo’s report did not include any policy directions for the commission.
Koo responded by promising an internal investigation into the lack of action by the commission in 2014, when it first detected lending irregularities at SinoPac Financial during an audit.
He also said that he is considering raising the maximum fine that could be levied on infractions from the NT$10 million (US$328,407), which he said was inadequate to give teeth to regulations.
DPP Legislator Chiang Yung-chang (江永昌) told Koo that he had drafted a bill to bolster corporate governance by requiring companies to run their legal and compliance departments independently of each other.
Chiang’s proposals includes barring a financial company employee from concurrently holding the top position in a firm’s compliance and legal departments, and requiring a company’s top compliance officer to report directly to its board of directors instead of the company president.
Preserving operating independence is key to preventing missteps and compliance staff must be distanced from a company’s profit-seeking sections, Chiang said.
The DPP lawmaker asked the commission to conduct a feasibility study on bolstering the rules on internal audit and internal control systems for financial holding companies and the banking industries, and to deliver its findings in two months.
In related news, foreign institutional investors in Taiwan recorded a net fund outflow of US$2.307 billion last month, the third consecutive month of foreign fund outflow, according to the commission’s statistics released yesterday.
The outflows reflected anticipation of a stronger US dollar as the US economy continued to grow, which in turn might prompt an interest rate hike in the US soon, analysts said.
Due to the foreign fund outflows, the TAIEX fell 1.91 percent last month, but the commission said there are no concerns about liquidity in the local equity market, and the bourse remained healthy.
Despite the net foreign fund outflows over the past three months, local investors have been pouring money into the equity market, which has kept the daily turnover on the main board above NT$100 billion in recent sessions, the commission said.
In the first nine months of the year, foreign institutional investors registered a net fund inflow of US$7.24 billion, the commission’s data showed.
Additional reporting by CNA
RECYCLE: Taiwan would aid manufacturers in refining rare earths from discarded appliances, which would fit the nation’s circular economy goals, minister Kung said Taiwan would work with the US and Japan on a proposed cooperation initiative in response to Beijing’s newly announced rare earth export curbs, Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said yesterday. China last week announced new restrictions requiring companies to obtain export licenses if their products contain more than 0.1 percent of Chinese-origin rare earths by value. US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent on Wednesday responded by saying that Beijing was “unreliable” in its rare earths exports, adding that the US would “neither be commanded, nor controlled” by China, several media outlets reported. Japanese Minister of Finance Katsunobu Kato yesterday also
Taiwan’s rapidly aging population is fueling a sharp increase in homes occupied solely by elderly people, a trend that is reshaping the nation’s housing market and social fabric, real-estate brokers said yesterday. About 850,000 residences were occupied by elderly people in the first quarter, including 655,000 that housed only one resident, the Ministry of the Interior said. The figures have nearly doubled from a decade earlier, Great Home Realty Co (大家房屋) said, as people aged 65 and older now make up 20.8 percent of the population. “The so-called silver tsunami represents more than just a demographic shift — it could fundamentally redefine the
China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空) said it expects peak season effects in the fourth quarter to continue to boost demand for passenger flights and cargo services, after reporting its second-highest-ever September sales on Monday. The carrier said it posted NT$15.88 billion (US$517 million) in consolidated sales last month, trailing only September last year’s NT$16.01 billion. Last month, CAL generated NT$8.77 billion from its passenger flights and NT$5.37 billion from cargo services, it said. In the first nine months of this year, the carrier posted NT$154.93 billion in cumulative sales, up 2.62 percent from a year earlier, marking the second-highest level for the January-September
Businesses across the global semiconductor supply chain are bracing themselves for disruptions from an escalating trade war, after China imposed curbs on rare earth mineral exports and the US responded with additional tariffs and restrictions on software sales to the Asian nation. China’s restrictions, the most targeted move yet to limit supplies of rare earth materials, represent the first major attempt by Beijing to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over foreign companies to target the semiconductor industry, threatening to stall the chips powering the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. They prompted US President Donald Trump on Friday to announce that he would impose an additional
RSS