The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) plans to tighten its oversight over local investment brokerages to hold company board members accountable if fund managers are found to be involved in fraud or malpractice, the commission said on Thursday.
The FSC would stipulate in the Regulations Governing Responsible Persons and Associated Persons of Securities Investment Trust Enterprises (證券投資信託事業負責人與業務人員管理規則) that board members are responsible for supervising fund managers, it told a news videoconference.
“Board members appoint fund managers and the commission will ask companies to establish an accountability system to enhance their corporate governance,” Securities and Futures Bureau Deputy Director-General Chang Tzy-ming (張子敏) told the conference.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
If fund managers are found to be involved in malpractice, the commission would consider dismissing the board members from their posts, Chang said, adding that the severest punishment would be to revoke operating permission.
The FSC’s announcement follows reports in the past few years of fund managers at local securities investment companies found to have either colluded with government officials in stocks speculation or to have illegally used insider information to trade personal stocks.
Knowing that the Labor Pension Fund was to invest in some specific stocks, some fund managers allegedly purchased the shares and sold them after the price rose, while other fund managers bought shares with knowledge that their companies were to invest in them, reports said.
In one such case, two fund managers made at least NT$80 million (US$2.56 million) between them, while another group that included an official in charge of a pension fund made NT$538 million, Taipei District Court records show.
Given the rise in malpractice cases among fund managers, the FSC increased the maximum fine for such activity to NT$15 million from NT$3 million.
The commission would bar people from serving on the boards of two or more securities investment companies to prevent conflicts of interests, Chang said.
However, this rule would not apply to state-owned securities firms, he said.
Although the FSC is generally tightening rules for fund managers, it would relax one rule, allowing them to manage the wealth of their dependent children, it said.
This is a reasonable activity, it said.
The changes to the regulations would take effect in 60 days, Chang said.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS