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SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea will allow mutual savings firms and online-based companies to sell investment funds from next February, and draw up measures to cut sales fees for long-term investors, a regulator said on Sunday.
The Financial Services Commission FSC.L said in a statement that it will also tighten investor protection rules for fund sellers to teach customers risks from an investment, as well as its commissions and fees.
"South Korea’s fund sales market has been in the oligopolistic structure, which lacked competition for services and commissions between sellers," the statement said.
Currently, only banks, securities houses and insurance companies are authorised to sell investment funds which accounted for nearly 10 percent of the country’s household financial assets in 2007.
Reuters UK – Lehman Brothers has intensified talks with Korea Development Bank to raise as much as $6 billion (3.3 billion pounds) in a share sale that could be concluded this week, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
South Korea’s KDB KDB.L could buy up to 25 percent of the struggling U.S. investment bank, the paper said, without specifying sources. A spokesman for state-run KDB declined to comment.
A senior source at the Financial Services Commission FSC.L, told Reuters South Korean authorities would not oppose or support any deal until price details were known.
That appeared to mark a shift by the regulator, which previously said KDB should let local private banks take the lead in any international acquisitions, dashing hopes for a direct deal with Lehman.
BusinessWeek- Lee Shyan-Yuan, one of several commissioners at Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC), believes attracting hedge funds to the market would be a smart move.
He is courting hedge funds to invest in Taiwan and raise money from investors in that market. That’s a bold move from a regulator, considering that many of his peers in other markets in Asia have not yet fully embraced hedge funds; some even still consider them the enemy.
Hedge funds, after all, have been blamed—justifiably or not—at least in part for some of the difficult periods in Asia’s financial markets, most notably the regional financial crisis beginning in 1997.
