Author: Gill Baker Thailand has a huge number of debt restructuring cases and non-performing borrowers but they are steadily being dealt with. And the signs are that the authorities are starting to break the back of the problem, although there is still a long way to go.
In total some 282,000 companies were restructured, or were in the process of being restructured, in April and May alone, representing Bt2.286 trillion ($57 billion) of outstanding credit. Of those, 40,000 cases were pending completion, and that pile is growing by around 6,000 new cases a month, based on most recent figures, and work on sorting out the large defaulters is still only halfway through.
The Bank of Thailand is now confident that most outstanding “large” debt restructurings being overseen by the Corporate Debt Restructuring Advisory Committee (CDRAC) will be concluded by the end of the year. Richard Henderson, research director at Kim Eng Securities, believes most of the restructured loans are either high profile, or the easier, unilateral cases, leaving a combination of difficult and less high-profile ones to be tackled. “There is no evidence that the problem loans have been restructured properly or been accounted for properly,” he adds.