The auction of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China's 450 billion yuan (US$54.3 billion) of bad debts has been delayed to give more time to fine tune procedures.

The auction, which was scheduled for June 19, has been postponed possibly until the end of this month because of some misclassified packages of NPLs (non-performing loans)

A manager from one of the four asset management companies (AMCs) argued that some of the assets should have been classified as total loss and moved to debt-clearing firm China Huarong Asset Management, along with 246 billion yuan (US$29.6 billion) of similar assets last month.

The People's Bank of China did not give a new timetable for the sale, but asked asset managers to settle the transaction by the end of this month in time for ICBC to include its clean balance sheet in its first-half results, a source said.

"The delay of a few days has no influence on us," Wang Haijun, director of the investment banking department of China Cinda Asset Management Corporation, said. "We have well prepared for this auction and we are waiting for final auction approval from the People's Bank of China."

This batch of NPLs was divided into 35 packages based on their provincial locations. "We don't care about their size, but their prospective profit margin really matters," Wang Haijun added.

Different from last June's auction, where Cinda got all 270 billion yuan (US$32.5 billion) of NPLs from the Bank of China and China Construction Bank, four AMCs can all get a slice of the cake this time.

The four AMCs - China Huarong, China Cinda, China Orient and China Great Wall - were set up in 1999 and took over 1.4 trillion yuan (US$168 billion) NPLs from the four State-owned commercial banks.

By the end of March, the AMCs had disposed of 688.6 billion yuan (US$83 billion) of bad debts, recovering little more than 20 per cent of their face value.

ICBC is working towards a stock market offering following massive financial restructuring.

According to the bank's joint-stock plan, about 700 billion yuan (US$84.3 billion) of NPLs will be peeled off.

On the completion of this imminent transaction, ICBC's NPL ratio will drop to 2 to 3 per cent from 16 per cent, paving the way for its IPO (initial public offering) in 2006 or 2007.

The bank plans to set up a joint-stock bank by October if everything goes smoothly.