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.