March 11, 1999
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| March 11, 1999 | atimes.com | |
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| Southeast Asia Malaysia mulls option: close or merge remaining finance firms KUALA LUMPUR - Bank Negara Malaysia governor Ali Abul Hassan bin Sulaiman said the remaining four or five finance companies left to be strengthened might be merged. ''We are looking if they can all be merged, or worse come to worst, we will close them down,'' he added. Ali said Bank Negara has given a clear indication of its intention but he insisted that the central bank did not want ''forced mergers'' between finance companies. He added that by the end of 1999, Bank Negara envisaged that the number of finance companies in the country would be reduced to less than half. ''There were 39 finance companies as at the end of 1997,'' he told newsmen after delivering a paper on ''Asian Financial Turmoil and Its Implications - The Malaysian Experience So Far'' at the Malaysian-Japan Economic Association 21st Joint Conference here. Ali also said there is no failure in efforts to strengthen finance companies as a lot of commercial banks have been asked to absorb them. ''If my memory is right, 18 of these companies have already been absorbed by existing commercial banks,'' he said. He added that the overall merger process of commercial banks and finance companies is progressing well and Bank Negara ''is pushing hard." ''Our long term objective is to bring down the number of domestic commercial banks, which currently stands at 22 to 16 or so . . . . We want to do this in stages,'' the governor said. He also said it was difficult to place a timeframe on when the number of commercial banks could be reduced to 16. Apart from mergers that have already been announced among commercial banks, Ali said Bank Negara was in discussions with a few more to get them to merge. In February, a merger between Commerce Asset-Holding Bhd and Bank Bumiputra Malaysia Bhd (BBMB) was announced, which paved the way for the establishment of Malaysia's second largest financial services group. In April last year, the RHB group acquired troubled Sime Bank to have it merged with RHB Bank. (Asia Pulse/Bernama) | |||||||||
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