China Banks Fill Syndicated Loan Void as RBS Retreats

BoyRacer · November 21, 2009, 8:55pm

China Banks Fill Syndicated Loan Void as RBS Retreats -> bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= … 5LA&pos=13

Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) – Foster’s Group Ltd., Australia’s biggest brewer, never borrowed from China until this year, when Bank of China Ltd. helped arrange $500 million in loans to refinance debt.

Chinese lenders are “injecting large amounts of liquidity,” said Peter Kopanidis, group treasurer at Melbourne- based Foster’s. The combination of the world’s fastest-growing economy and “a very different deposit base” is helping Bank of China “contribute more at a time when some banks may be capital-constrained,” he said.

Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. and Bank of China underwrote $25.6 billion of syndicated loans in Asia- Pacific outside Japan this year, or 14.5 percent of the total, up from 4.9 percent a year earlier, data compiled by Bloomberg show. They’re providing capital as western banks from New York- based Citigroup Inc. to Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in Edinburgh retrench after global financial institutions took $1.7 trillion of writedowns and losses since the start of 2007.

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