The General Office of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission ("CBIRC") has recently distributed the Circular on Further Ensuring Effective Work on Credit Loans and Boosting the Quality and Effects of Services for the Real Economy (the "Circular").
The Circular outlines concrete measures in nine aspects, including "activating the stock assets and increasing the fund use efficiency". Further, the Circular clearly states that behaviors relating to loans will be regulated, adding that efforts shall be made in strict accordance with applicable standards and procedures to make pre-loan investigations, examine loan applications and carry out post-loan inspections, and that it is disallowed to reach an agreement through negotiation or set a compulsory clause to require depositing the loans back, or to issue loans bundled or tied with other financial products, such as wealth management products, fund products and insurance products. Furthermore, the Circular requires that, assistance may be sought from local governments and industry associations in launching investigations to look into situations of export-oriented enterprises, and fund arrangements could, to a proper extent, give priority to those major good-quality enterprises that face the development prospect, despite temporary difficulties as a result of serious influences from the international market; cooperation with foreign trade enterprises, credit insurance institutions, financing guarantee institutions and local governments shall be strengthened to expand the export credit insurance policy financing and export rebate account pledge financing.