China's banking watchdog Monday promised a major breakthrough in curbing major financial crimes concerning the banking sector within a period of about one year.

Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), urged the country's state-owned commercial banks to bring down the incidence of major bank crimes in about one year, the commission said in a statement.

The commission said Liu made remarks on April 12 during a national meeting on combating financial crimes concerning state-owned banks. Leading managers of the top four state-owned banks were among those attending the meeting.

To keep pace with risk control and crime prevention in the changing situation, the chairman told the meeting that CBRC is working with other government departments in improving a set of mechanism regarding human resources management, supervision, accountability, statistics, accounting, auditing, information disclosure and management, according to the statement.

The country's major state-owned banks, which dominate the banking sector, have all set up taskforces to curb bank-related crimes since Feb. 5, 2005 after crimes involving state-owned bankstook place one after another. The regulator soon issued an instruction to those banks calling for substantial measures on risk control.

Bank crimes have been frequently unveiled in recent years, as China is striving to reform its bank system, whose rate of non-performing loans stood at 15.6 percent on average by the end of 2004.

"The frequent occurrence of serious bank crimes is resultant from unreasonable old systems, social credit environment, traditional banking culture in China as well as the impotency of supervision mechanism," Liu acknowledged.

A number of bank frauds were made public over recent months, including one in northeast Heilongjiang Province involving hundreds of millions of yuan, and a massive fraud involving 95 million yuan (US$11.4 million) in a branch of China Everbright Bank in southern Guangdong Province.

In March, Zhai Changping, an employee with the Dalian City branch of the Bank of China (BOC) in northeast China's Liaoning Province, was arrested and charged with embezzling US$6 million.

The Chinese government has recently ordered the watchdog to further improve risk control in state-owned banking sector.

(Xinhua News Agency April 20, 2005)