South Korea has said it will inspect banks' handling of foreign currency, a move analysts believe is designed to help resist appreciation of the Korean won.
It paints a scathing portrait of how the Fire Department and the Department of Buildings inspected — or failed to inspect — the bank building in the months before a fatal fire on Aug. 18, 2007.
The group says that it regularly inspects the banks and that it tracks the results of transplants using cells from individual banks to make sure there are no quality-control problems.
But a closer look at "Frozen Assets", a mural that juxtaposes rows of sleeping homeless people with the wealthy inspecting their bank vaults, reveals an eerie prescience.
Even as the FSA was inspecting the bank, pensioners, who did not even know what a share was, were persuaded to cash in their deposits and buy shares instead.
Fire officials have previously said that in conversations with the three senior officers who were disciplined, none indicated that they had been told not to inspect the bank building.
Even within the Fire Department there have been bitter recriminations between the fire commanders, who the Bloomberg administration has said failed to inspect the bank building properly, as required, and the department's top brass, who the fire unions have maintained should have been aware that the building was not being inspected.
The Bloomberg officials had characterized the requirement as an important safety precaution and cited it as the rationale for reassigning a local engine company's commander whose firefighters had not inspected the bank building in the months preceding the fire, in which two firefighters died.
And on October 14th having inspected 11 banks, the CBRC concluded that it is "common practice" for banks to ignore regulations and fail to monitor loans, and that bad-loan levels are "not accurately revealed".
In the Cirio case, it inspected ten banks earlier this year.
