Jiangsu Protruly Visual Technology Group (600074.CH), an electronic visual company in China that also manufactures mobile phones, said on Sunday that HSBC Shenzhen had frozen 72.78 million yuan (US$11.16 million) in assets that the company had raised and deposited at Ping An Bank’s Shenzhen branch, Yicai.com reported on Monday.
Ping An Bank later froze US$26.53 million of Protuly’s funds deposited with the bank, including two of Protruly’s properties located in Shenzhen’s Nanshan district, the Yicai report said. This means that the company has a total of 245 million yuan (US$37.4 million) worth of funds and assets frozen by the two banks.
The company had applied for close to 150 million yuan, or US$23 million, worth of credit from HSBC Shenzhen in March this year, with about US$10.53 million left to pay as of this month, the report added.
Protuly told Yicai that HSBC had asked the company to increase its guaranteed sum for its loan in the middle of August this year. The company had refused as it had a “good banking record” with HSBC and increasing the guaranteed sum would make it harder to get loans in future, it said.
HSBC said that it had a “right to ask a borrower to repay a loan anytime” in the notice sent out by Protruly to the stock exchange, according to Yicai.
Protruly does not rule out other cooperative banks freezing its assets and has characterized the act by HSBC as act of “ill intention,” and said it will bring up the case before a Shenzhen court.