State Auditing Administration's auditing on Bank of China head office, 7 provincial branches and about 150 subdivisions balance sheet 2000 showed that the bank's capacity to earn profit and capital sufficiency rate have somewhat increased, but problems basically remain in terms of poor performance of property quality and high costs.

Li Jinhua, director of the Auditing Administration, addressed the ongoing auditing conference that the main problems found through auditing were providing loans against rules, operating business without clear accounts and granting credit cards and bank drafts in violation of regulations. Meanwhile, the administration revealed 22 clues of criminal cases involving a sum of 270 million yuan and 35 persons, who were already handed over to departments concerned for investigation.

Li said the administration also launched duty-related account audit of leaders from 10 key enterprises, of which 8 has been preliminarily audited, with 3.48 billion yuan(US$4209.66 million) suspected of breaking the rules and regulations. The uncovered problems were releasing false accounting information, violating rules to trade stocks, evading taxes and so on.

Twenty-two criminal cases, involving 59.5 million yuan(US$7.20 million) and 61 persons, exposed by the audit were already transferred to judicial bodies.

( January 16, 2002)