The China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) announced Wednesday that it will step up supervision over the activities of the country's four financial assets management companies.
  
The decision was made at a recent meeting held by the CBRC to discuss the issue.
  
A number of regulations will be promulgated soon to stop irregularities regarding the handling of bad assets left by the four state-owned commercial banks, the Construction Bank of China (CBC), the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) and the Bank of China (BOC).
  
In 1999, the government set up four assets management companies, Xinda for the CBC, Huarong for the ICBC, Changcheng for the ABC and Dongfang for the BOC.
  
Since then, the four companies have taken over all the bad loans from the four state commercial banks, and have sold packages worth 600 billion yuan (US$72.3 billion) of non-performing loans and recovered 121.6 billion yuan (US$14.7 billion) in cash and 38.15 billion yuan (US$4.6 billion) in non-cash properties.

(Xinhua News Agency December 30, 2004)