Bank of China, the country's largest foreign-currency lender, said it would push ahead with reforms in the wake of financial scandals as it unveiled a 45.8 percent jump in first-quarter pretax profit. Management has taken measures to beef up internal controls since state media has revealed in recent months the latest financial scandals to hit the institution, eyeing a multi-billion-dollar listing. A spokesman for the bank, Wang Zhaowen, told reporters on Monday the bank was striving to improve internal controls and there were now widespread checks on potential wrongdoing at the grassroots level.
Scandals including the disappearance of up to 1 billion yuan ($121 million) at a sub-branch in the north-eastern city of Harbin and the sacking of executives at the Beijing branch after a developer secured loans illegally had damaged the bank's image, he said.
Bank of China said in a statement pretax profit hit 19.2 billion yuan ($2.3 billion) in the first quarter, helped as profits had not been used to write off bad assets as in 2004.
Non-performing credit - a wider definition of bad assets that includes non-performing loans - came in at 4.67 percent of all credit at the end of March, down 0.42 percentage point from the beginning of this year, it said.
Total assets rose 3 percent from the end of 2004 to 4.385 trillion yuan at the end of March, the bank said.
Its first-quarter capital adequacy ratio exceeded 8 percent, spokeswoman Zhou Ning told reporters.