Shinhan Card said on the 12th it has decided to sell the entire portion of long-term arrears claims corresponding to Shinhan Card's equity among the claims held by the private bad-debt processing company Sangnoksoojeilcha Asset-Backed Special Purpose Company (Sangnoksoo) to the New Leap Fund of the Korea Asset Management Corporation (KAMCO).
Sangnoksoo is a private bad-debt processing company created by the financial sector in October 2003 to clean up bad debts during the credit card crisis. Shinhan Card's equity ratio is about 30%.
If the claims are transferred to the New Leap Fund, collection against the relevant borrowers will be immediately halted, debt adjustments and installment repayment will be pursued according to repayment capacity, and for borrowers such as Basic Livelihood Security recipients who lack repayment capacity, the claims will be automatically extinguished within one year.
A Shinhan Card official said, "We deeply regret not recognizing sooner the situation of borrowers who have been in economic hardship for more than 20 years," adding, "We decided to sell all the claims because we could no longer delay, and we will more actively put the value of inclusive finance into practice going forward."
President Lee Jae-myung on the day raised an issue on his X (formerly Twitter), saying the long-term claims of Sangnoksoo, a private bad bank established to dispose of bad debts during the credit card crisis, were not included in the government's New Leap Fund. Lee said, "I didn't know such a primitive predatory finance was still brazenly surviving and tightening the noose on ordinary people," and noted, "Why have the authorities in charge failed even to detect such corruption until now?"