Years ago, when Industrial & Commercial Bank of China was getting ready to list, it went through its own spring cleaning of its balance sheet. It established Huarong Asset Management, a platform to take all its bad debts, while the Ministry of Finance recapitalised the bank itself.
Today, Huarong has reinvented itself as a non-bank financial institution. Its Beijing-based unit Rongde Asset Management is busy making loans to those who can’t borrow in China directly from ICBC itself, albeit at much higher rates of up to 20 per cent per year, thanks to introductions from the big Chinese bank.
Huarong says that “all businesses operated by Rongde in China abide by Chinese rules and regulations”. Rongde has never done business in or via Hong Kong, as wrongly suggested in an earlier version of this article.