A key Diet panel will summon the presidents of the nation's four major banking groups and the chiefs of banking industry bodies to testify on the bank shakeup plan devised by Financial Services Minister Heizo Takenaka, lawmakers said Tuesday.
Terunobu Maeda, president of Mizuho Holdings Inc., and the presidents of the three other banking groups will be asked to give unsworn testimony Friday morning before the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Affairs.
Representatives from the Japanese Bankers Association and the National Association of Shinkin Banks, an industry body overseeing Japan's 349 "shinkin" credit banks, are to testify before the panel on Friday afternoon.
Shinkin banks are the equivalent of U.S. savings and loan associations, although their deposit and asset bases dwarf those of their U.S. counterparts.
The members of the panel are expected to question the leaders of the banking groups and industry bodies on the probable impact of Takenaka's bank shakeup plan on their business conditions and their lending policies toward small and medium-size companies.
The Takenaka plan calls on banks to put up far greater loan-loss reserves and use tighter criteria in classifying the quality of outstanding loans, while "speedily considering" limiting the sum of deferred tax assets that can be counted as part of a bank's core capital, called Tier 1.
The plan has drawn flak from the presidents of major banks, who say it would put heavy downward pressure on their capital adequacy ratios and aggravate the credit crunch.