No roll over for loans, Japan says

No roll over for loans, Japan says

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters): Japan told yesterday Southeast Asian
nations that it could not help their troubled economies by
forcing private banks to roll over loans, Philippine President
Fidel Ramos said.

Ramos told a news conference after a regional summit in the
Malaysian capital that Thailand had suggested Japanese banks roll
over loans falling due as part of an effort to support Southeast
Asia's economies.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad told a separate news
conference that "there was some suggestion that they (Japanese
banks) should roll back, and it applied really to the private
sector, not so much the government".

The Philippine leader said Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro
Hashimoto told the leaders of the nine-member Association of
South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) that the Japanese government
could not order private banks to roll over the loans.

"Prime Minister Hashimoto made it very clear that under our
present systems of government,...government cannot order the
private sector, especially private sector banks, to do this or do
that," Ramos said.

"But there must be a best effort to put government as the
regulatory agency and the private financial institutions to
cooperate more closely towards solving a common problem, which is
everybody's problem," the Philippine leader said.