Close to 29 of commercial banks have revealed to Iran’s Central Bank the names of the firms they own, said the deputy governor of the CBI on Monday.
The remaining five banks are to announce the list of their companies in two days, said Hamid Tehranfar, “after they are done with making necessary revisions and finalizing the list.”
According to Tehranfar, 600 corporations are owned by banks, whose assets and equities total 2666 trillion rials ($100 billion), comprising 48-49 percent of the banks’ total capital. With the help of the CBI this amount should be reduced to 40 percent to conform to the monetary and banking act.
“The commercial banks are set to sell the surpluses of their firm assets and equities in near future,” said Tehranfar.
About two weeks ago, the central bank had instructed commercial banks to provide it with the list of companies that the banks either had ownership in their capital or in their corporate bodies.
The deputy said the CBI announcement was welcomed by commercial banks, which is represented in the fact that a majority of them did what they had been asked to do and met the deadline.
This is while four days ago, when the deadline expired, concern was raised among some experts who believed commercial banks had not taken the warning of the CBI seriously. They even went so far as to say that the CBI needed to take serious action to force them to obey the regulations.
Details which they are supposed to submit to the central bank include, the value of their ownership in other companies, the area in which the sub-corporation works in and their total numbers of shares, all of which will be revealed to the public at a later stage.
