State-run Mega International Commercial Bank (兆豐銀行) was yesterday fined NT$10 million (US$360,972) for its lax internal control over 28 mortgages totaling NT$350 million, whose applications were made by dummy accounts, the Financial Supervisory Commission said.
Mega Bank became the nation’s third bank to be punished for failing to detect mortgage applications made by dummy accounts. Hua Nan Commercial Bank (華南銀行) was fined NT$3 million in 2016 for offering mortgages to 34 figurehead accounts, some of whom belonged to vagrants, and Hwatai Bank (華泰銀行) was fined NT$3 million in 2018, commission data showed.
“It seems that this specific type of mortgage fraud has not been effectively curbed among local banks, ” Banking Bureau Deputy Director-General Huang Kuang-hsi (黃光熙) told a videoconference in New Taipei City.
Photo: Lee Chin-hui, Taipei Times
An employee surnamed Shih (石) working at Mega Bank’s Sindian branch (新店) in New Taipei City approved the mortgages from July in 2015 to the end of 2019.
However, the lender last year found in an internal audit that the mortgage applications were made by figureheads who used funds from a third party to repay the loans, Huang said.
Shih did not review the applicants’ profiles or conform to the bank’s loan approval criteria while approving the applications, and even helped transfer the third-party deposit money into the dummy accounts, he said.
Prosecutors have been working on the case since last year and have charged Shih, her ex-husband, surnamed Hsu (許), and a land administration agent surnamed Chou (周) with contraventions of the Banking Act (銀行法) and fraud, local media reported.
Shih reportedly worked with Hsu, who was a real-estate agent, and allegedly colluded with Chou to inflate the prices of the apartments she bought in Taipei and New Taipei City to obtain higher mortgages, and used the loan to buy other properties, local media reported.
Huang did not provide further details, but said that Mega Bank has made many mistakes in the mortgage operations, including incorrect collateral appraisal, and allowing the same employee to review loan applications and appraise collateral.
Mega Bank has estimated that it would likely incur a loss of NT$22 million due to the 28 problematic mortgages, Huang said.
PERSISTENT RUMORS: Nvidia’s CEO said the firm is not in talks to sell AI chips to China, but he would welcome a change in US policy barring the activity Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company is not in discussions to sell its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese firms, waving off speculation it is trying to engineer a return to the world’s largest semiconductor market. Huang, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday ahead of meetings with longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), took the opportunity to clarify recent comments about the US-China AI race. The Nvidia head caused a stir in an interview this week with the Financial Times, in which he was quoted as saying “China will win” the AI race. Huang yesterday said
Japanese technology giant Softbank Group Corp said Tuesday it has sold its stake in Nvidia Corp, raising US$5.8 billion to pour into other investments. It also reported its profit nearly tripled in the first half of this fiscal year from a year earlier. Tokyo-based Softbank said it sold the stake in Silicon Vally-based Nvidia last month, a move that reflects its shift in focus to OpenAI, owner of the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT. Softbank reported its profit in the April-to-September period soared to about 2.5 trillion yen (about US$13 billion). Its sales for the six month period rose 7.7 percent year-on-year
MORE WEIGHT: The national weighting was raised in one index while holding steady in two others, while several companies rose or fell in prominence MSCI Inc, a global index provider, has raised Taiwan’s weighting in one of its major indices and left the country’s weighting unchanged in two other indices after a regular index review. In a statement released on Thursday, MSCI said it has upgraded Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country World Index by 0.02 percentage points to 2.25 percent, while maintaining the weighting in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, the most closely watched by foreign institutional investors, at 20.46 percent. Additionally, the index provider has left Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country Asia ex-Japan Index unchanged at 23.15 percent. The latest index adjustments are to
CRESTING WAVE: Companies are still buying in, but the shivers in the market could be the first signs that the AI wave has peaked and the collapse is upon the world Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported a new monthly record of NT$367.47 billion (US$11.85 billion) in consolidated sales for last month thanks to global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Last month’s figure represented 16.9 percent annual growth, the slowest pace since February last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 11 percent. Cumulative sales in the first 10 months of the year grew 33.8 percent year-on-year to NT$3.13 trillion, a record for the same period in the company’s history. However, the slowing growth in monthly sales last month highlights uncertainty over the sustainability of the AI boom even as
RSS