VAMC buys $1.12 billion bad debts this year

With this purchase, made from January 1 to September 30 this year, the company met the plan for the whole of 2017, as assigned by the government.
Since its establishment in 2013 till the end of September this year, the company has bought a total of more than VND301 trillion of NPLs from 42 credit institutions at a price of VND270.92 trillion.
The company has recently begun using its right to repossess collaterals, given to it by the Resolution 42/2017/QH14 on piloting the bad debt settlement of credit institutions.
Sai Gon One Tower is an asset mortgaged for a bad debt worth VND7 trillion that Maritime Bank and Dong A Bank transferred to VAMC in April 2015. According to Doan Van Thang, general director of VAMC, this is the biggest debt with mortgaged assets that VAMC has ever bought.

Headquarters of the Vietnam Asset Management Company in Hanoi.

After repossessing Sai Gon One Tower, VAMC on September 26 announced on its website that the individuals and institutions who have rights and interests related to the assets need to contact VAMC within 30 days.
VAMC will have the assets evaluated and auctioned off to collect the debt after the repossession.
Resolution 42 has given more power to VAMC to accelerate the process of bad debt settlement.
VAMC has also announced it is looking for price evaluation enterprises to appraise the bad debt and the collaterals transferred to it by Sacombank. The collaterals comprise eight land plots.
Nguyen Tien Dong, VAMC chairman, said that the company will buy debts with cash in the fourth quarter of 2017. However, experts said that it will take VAMC difficult to implement the plan as its capital is still modest. With the current charter capital of only VNĐ2 trillion, the VAMC will not be able to do much to handle the huge debts, they said.
Expert Tran Du Lich said that the VAMC’s capital was too modest compared with the hundreds of trillions of NPLs that needed to be settled. According to the new resolution, VAMC must buy the NPLs based on market mechanism, so it cannot use its special bonds to buy the debts, as was being done previously, he explained.
Earlier, credit institutions sold their NPLs to VAMC in exchange for special bonds that matured in five or 10 years.
Though the VAMC is permitted to increase the capital to VNĐ10 trillion by 2020 according to a project on restructuring credit institutions in the period between 2016 and 2020, it is too late as the NPL settlement is urgent, Lich said.