China Construction Bank (CCB) signed an agreement in Beijing Tuesday with the United States investment bank Morgan Stanley to jointly dispose of 4.3 billion yuan (US$518 million) worth of non-performing assets.

It marked the first time that a Chinese State-owned commercial bank and a foreign company have agreed to work together to deal with such assets.

Under the agreement, the two sides will establish a co-operative joint venture that will officially own the assets and a joint-venture loan-servicing company to manage and deal with the assets.

John Langlois of Morgan Stanley said the non-performing assets could be disposed of within five years.

Yang Xiaoyang, general manager of CCB's Special Asset Resolution Department, said the two sides have completed a series of due-diligence studies, structuring, and negotiations on valuation and transaction documents regarding the project.

But the project has yet to be approved by the relevant government departments, including the central People's Bank of China, China Banking Regulatory Commission and the Ministry of Finance, Yang said.

"The deal, if approved, would help us move more quickly in disposing of the non-performing loans,'' he said.

China Construction Bank handed 250 billion yuan (US$30.1 billion) worth of non-performing assets over to the China Cinda Asset Management Corp in 1999. The bank still had 267.8 billion yuan (US$32.3 billion) worth of non-performing assets at the end of last year.

By then, the bank's non-performing loan ratio stood at 15.36 per cent under the international five-category classification, Yang said.

"We have to speed up disposal of the non-performing assets because we want to become the first State-owned commercial bank to be listed on the domestic stock exchanges,'' he said.

Zhang Enzhao, CCB president, said his bank aims to reduce its bad-loan ratio to less than 10 per cent by the end of next year.

To achieve this goal, the bank will have to explore new ways to handle bad assets, Yang said.

The bank will try to dispose of 55 billion yuan (US$6.6 billion) worth of bad assets this year, he said.

"We aim to reduce the non-performing loans by 4 percentage points this year,'' he said.

Huang Jinlao, a senior researcher with the International Financial Research Institute, said Chinese commercial banks would have to lower their rate of bad loans, get rid of their historical financial burdens and raise their capital adequacy to international standards because more and more foreign financial institutions have begun to enter the Chinese market.

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