Asian markets urge private sector to increase disclosures

Asian markets urge private sector to increase disclosures

HANOI (Agencies): Southeast Asia and its regional partners
called on the international private sector Thursday to step up
financial disclosure, which they said was crucial to avert future
economic shocks.

"We will propose more effort and moral suasion, if you like to
say, from international agencies and much developed countries for
having some more disclosure and transparency not only from the
public sector side but also the private sector side," said
Miranda Goeltom, a director of the central Bank Indonesia.

"Everybody agrees it is a very important issue but everybody
also agrees that it can only be beneficial if disclosures are not
only limited to public sector disclosures but also private sector
disclosures," she said.

Miranda was speaking to reporters following a meeting of vice
finance chiefs of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) and deputy central bank governors with their counterparts
from Japan, China and South Korea.

Miranda said ASEAN wanted "more understanding from the
institutional investors, from the private investors, to provide
more information and more data so that any monitoring could be
made more effective."

Jin Li-Qun, vice minister of finance for China, said
international financial institutions and developed countries
should recognize that the crisis-hit countries had done much to
improve their standards of transparency.

"The target is always directed at the countries, at the
governments, rather than the financial institutions," he told
reporters.

"We should take into account the fact that a number of
countries, particularly crisis-hit economies, have done a lot of
work to improve their monitoring systems. This is very
encouraging," he said.

"We should not just be looking at the economies, but looking
at international financial institutions in the private sector to
do things in this area," he added.

ASEAN groups Brunei, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the
Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

ASEAN is thrashing out the structure of a surveillance
process, which includes an early alert scheme that will warn
member economies of impending financial shocks.

Surveillance

Miranda said that compliance with a financial surveillance
mechanism designed to prevent future economic collapse in
Southeast Asia would be voluntary

But Miranda added that it was vital ASEAN collected financial
data from member countries to develop an early warning system.

Vietnam has said the mechanism, called the ASEAN Surveillance
Process, would be the most important point raised at a two-day
meeting in Hanoi between regional finance ministers which opens
on Friday.

"This information will be informal, which is not compulsory.
It's more voluntary but the understanding is that everyone is
willing to participate," Miranda told Reuters on the sidelines of
preparatory meetings between ASEAN finance officials.

"It's informal in nature but compulsory in our hearts. I think
everybody agrees it's important to share some information so we
can tackle the regional problems and the attitude to this
surveillance process has been very positive in every country."

The ASEAN Surveillance Process is a peer review mechanism
expected to track trends in macroeconomic indicators among the
member countries -- Brunei, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar,
the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Agreed in Jakarta one year ago amid little fanfare, the
measure represents a major response to Asia's crisis, officials
say. But getting nations such as communist Vietnam, which
classifies some data as a state secret, to comply could prove
tough, diplomats have said.