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.
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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