Banking News
- Bank of Beijing's child holders draw concern
Date: 11-Oct-2007 Sources: (Shenzhen Daily)
BANK of Beijing has confirmed it had dozens of shareholders below the age of 18, including a 10-year-old, drawing questions and criticism from financial experts and Internet users.
Bank of Beijing, which began trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in September, said the 84 investors were legal shareholders, who maintained the shares through the bank's restructuring in 1996 and capital increase in 2004, a Beijing newspaper said yesterday.
Among them, 35 people owned more than 100,000 shares, and one was as young as 10. The child became a shareholder when he was one, and now is the bank's 13th-largest shareholder, with some 1.3 million shares in the bank.
'The bank has noticed the situation when doing checks of shareholders, but under the relevant laws, regulations or other directives, there is no ban or restriction for people below the age of 18 holding shares,'the bank was quoted as saying.
'Therefore, there is no need for special dealings with the shares,'it added.
But legal and financial experts had said it was abnormal for a listed company to have so many under-aged shareholders, and the bank should expose information about their guardians.
It was not clear whether some of the guardians might be trying to take advantage of financial or tax benefits by shifting some family assets to the young shareholders' accounts.
'These young people cannot tell the risks of the market, and it is risky behavior for themselves and also for investors,'the China News Center quoted Liu Jipeng, a legal and economic professor as saying.
More and more ordinary Chinese have been sinking their savings into stocks, eager to cash in on the market's boom.
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