Our most recent stories:
Regulators:
China’s insurance regulator has taken over the management of Anbang, attributing the move to the company’s involvement in unlawful business activities which seriously endangered its ability to meet its financial obligations, according to a February 23 statement by the CIRC.
The watchdog has set up a takeover working group to manage Anbang for a year – a period which can be extended by another year if the company’s finances are still not in order – starting on February 23. The group was set up in conjunction with the People’s Bank of China, the China Banking Regulatory Commission, the China Securities Regulatory Commission and State Administration of Foreign Exchange.
The takeover group will come up with a proposal to resolve risks facing Anbang, hire a professional management team, and, with the CIRC’s permission, it may commission other insurance companies to run Anbang’s businesses and merge or spin-off parts of the company.
The CIRC insisted that Anbang will remain a private company. It also ordered Anbang to remove Wu Xiaohui, the company’s chairman and CEO, from his position. Wu is being prosecuted for economic crimes, said the regulator.
Investment:
Fullerton has started its first private fund in China, the asset manager said in a February 21 press release. The new fund, which will invest in Chinese A shares, will be available to high net worth individuals and institutional investors in the domestic market.
The fund was set up and will be managed by Fullerton’s wholly foreign-owned enterprise (WFOE) in Shanghai, which obtained the licence to sell private funds in China last September.
Mark Li, general manager of the Shanghai-based WFOE, said Chinese investors can expect more funds from Fullerton in years to come.
“This positive outcome paves the way for more launches nationwide in the future,” he said. “We look forward to expanding our product offerings to meet the needs of investors.”
Fullerton also invests in China via the qualified foreign institutional investor (QFII) and RMB QFII (RQFII) and China's interbank bond market direct (CIBM Direct) programmes, according to the press release. The asset manager has Rmb1.2bn of RQFII quotas, which were granted in 2014, GlobalRMB data shows.
Payments:
The renminbi was the fifth most used currency in January, according to Swift’s RMB tracker. The currency made up 1.66% of all global payments in the period, up from 1.61% in December 2017.
However, when looking at cross-border payments only, and excluding intra-Eurozone payments, the RMB is ranked eighth, making up only 1.07% of all payments. Nevertheless, this is an improvement from the RMB’s performance last December, when it only had a share of 0.98% in this category.
Hong Kong remained the largest offshore RMB clearing centre, clearing 75% of all RMB payments outside China. It was followed by the United Kingdom and Singapore, which had market shares of 5.85% and 5.07%, respectively.