The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday fined Taishin International Bank (台新銀行) a record NT$30 million (US$1.07 million) for oversight failure, after its staff stole NT$347 million from customers.
The fine was much higher than the penalty of NT$20 million handed to E.Sun Commercial Bank (玉山銀行) in November last year and the NT$12 million fine to Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) in December last year for similar failures.
An E.Sun employee had stolen NT$140 million from 41 clients, while Cathay United Bank’s staff had stolen NT$17.32 million from four clients, data from the commission showed.
Photo: Wang Meng-lun, Taipei Times
Taishin Bank received the heaviest punishment not only because the NT$347 million its former employee stole from nine clients was the highest among all bank thefts, but also because the employee had done so for more than a decade, from 2008 to last year, indicating the bank’s lax internal controls, the commission said.
The former employee, a customer relationship manager surnamed Chou (周) at a branch in New Taipei City’s Jhonghe District (中和), asked his clients to sign blank transfer forms and then used them to transfer their money to the bank accounts of his friends or his sister, Banking Bureau Deputy Director-General Huang Kuang-hsi (黃光熙) told a videoconference.
Although some of Chou’s clients applied to reconcile their bank accounts, the bank failed to save the records of account activity for inspection, Huang said.
When the bank in 2019 discovered the suspicious cash movement, Chou’s manager only asked him to write a report, but failed to continue monitoring him, Huang added.
The commission also faulted Taishin’s management, saying the bank had cut the branch’s workforce and was overly focused on how much sales its employees could generate, he said.
“Sales had a weighting of 40 percent in an employee’s performance assessment in 2016... Although the weighting was lowered in the following years, it was still comparatively higher than at other banks,” he said.
That might explain why when Chou secretly moved funds from his clients to other accounts, those responsible for checking did not spot the illegal activity, Huang said.
The FSC suspended Taishin Bank’s deputy head of consumer banking, surnamed Lin (林), for three months, saying Lin was responsible for the poor management as he had designed the employee performance assessment, Huang said.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of last month, surpassing the US$600 billion mark for the first time, the central bank said yesterday. Last month, the country’s foreign exchange reserves rose US$5.51 billion from a month earlier to reach US$602.94 billion due to an increase in returns from the central bank’s portfolio management, the movement of other foreign currencies in the portfolio against the US dollar and the bank’s efforts to smooth the volatility of the New Taiwan dollar. Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民)said a rate cut cycle launched by the US Federal Reserve
Handset camera lens maker Largan Precision Co (大立光) on Sunday reported a 6.71 percent year-on-year decline in revenue for the third quarter, despite revenue last month hitting the highest level in 11 months. Third-quarter revenue was NT$17.68 billion (US$581.2 million), compared with NT$18.95 billion a year earlier, the company said in a statement. The figure was in line with Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting Co’s (元大投顧) forecast of NT$17.9 billion, but missed the market consensus estimate of NT$18.97 billion. The third-quarter revenue was a 51.44 percent increase from NT$11.67 billion in the second quarter, as the quarter is usually the peak
Nvidia Corp’s major server production partner Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) reported 10.99 percent year-on-year growth in quarterly sales, signaling healthy demand for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. Revenue totaled NT$2.06 trillion (US$67.72 billion) in the last quarter, in line with analysts’ projections, a company statement said. On a quarterly basis, revenue was up 14.47 percent. Hon Hai’s businesses cover four primary product segments: cloud and networking, smart consumer electronics, computing, and components and other products. Last quarter, “cloud and networking products delivered strong growth, components and other products demonstrated significant growth, while smart consumer electronics and computing products slightly declined,” compared with the
The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies. The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech. Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of
RSS