China’s Inner Mongolia admits cooking economic data, puts key road and subway projects on hold www.scmp.com

A second major Chinese region has admitted to severely inflating fiscal and economic data, pledging to mend its ways and tame government borrowings in the next few years in part by halting various debt-burdened public projects.

The admission by the authorities in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region comes after Beijing made preventing financial risk one of its top economic priorities for the next three years at a key national policy conference chaired by Chinese President Xi Jinping last month.

At a two-day economic policy meeting last week, the government of Inner Mongolia said its industrial output figure for 2016 should be revised down by 40 per cent, and its fiscal revenue for that year was 26 per cent less than initially stated, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday.

The northeastern rust-belt province of Liaoning made a similar confession last January, when the authorities said its cities and counties had fabricated fiscal data between 2011 and 2014.

Does halting of subway project mark end of line for China’s infrastructure building boom?

The meeting in Inner Mongolia confirmed for the first time that the government had halted a 30.5 billion yuan (US$4.7 billion) subway project in Baotou, the region’s biggest industrial city, financial news outlet Caixin reported on Sunday.

The meeting also yielded confirmation that another three subway projects in the regional capital Hohhot were on hold, according to Xinhua.

In addition, an expressway project linking Hohhot and Ordos had been suspended, Caixin reported, citing banking regulators.

China is struggling under a mountain of local government debt which analysts say is a source of fragility for China’s financial system and economy. The Ministry of Finance released figures last month that put the debt pile at 16.6 trillion yuan at the end of November.

Concern about the borrowings prompted rating agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s to downgrade China’s sovereign credit rating last year.

In a separate report, Caixin quoted an Inner Mongolian finance department official as saying that since last year, the regional government had stopped setting revenue growth targets for lower-level governments, and eliminated them as factors in officials’ performance appraisals.

Can you still trust China’s economic data after province admits cooking books?

But a local government finance department official said local officials were not just cooking the books for their own benefit – better fiscal figures meant better credit ratings and cheaper debt issues.

Xinhua quoted Wu Wenming, a district chief in Hohhot, as saying that local governments were now committed to make “sensible” investment decisions to prevent “unreasonable debt”.

“Governments should live within our means and avoid excessive borrowing and irresponsibly creating [financial] risks,” Wu was quoted as saying.

Xinhua reported that after the adjustments, Inner Mongolia government revenue in 2017 should be 170.3 billion yuan, up 14.6 per cent up on 2016.

The report did not say how the corrections would affect Inner Mongolia’s gross domestic product, which grew 7.3 per cent in 2016 according to previously announced data.

Coal mine to re-open in Canada, another closes in US www.mining.com

Billions worth Mt. Gox bitcoins 'not lost': Someone doesn't want them found - RT source www.rt.com

The hundreds of thousands of bitcoins stolen from the Mt. Gox exchange four years ago could be recovered, but there are powerful forces against it, according to bitcoin entrepreneur William Mook.

The Tokyo-based virtual currency exchange handled around 80 percent of global bitcoin trades. Mt. Gox shut down and went bankrupt in February 2014 after suffering the biggest cryptocurrency heist on record.

The exchange said it had lost about 850,000 bitcoins – then worth around half a billion US dollars – and $28 million in cash from its Japanese bank accounts.

Mt. Gox blamed hackers for its lost bitcoins, pointing to a software security flaw. Later in March, it said that had found 200,000 of the missing tokens.

Not long after the exchange’s collapse, the public was shocked by the death of a virtual currency exchange First Meta’s CEO. The 28-year-old Autumn Radtke was found dead, having fallen from her apartment building in Singapore. Some media reported it was a suicide while others referred to it as a “questionable financial-sector death.”

“Autumn Radtke and her team and others, quietly found half the bitcoins that were supposedly stolen by Mt. Gox,” Mook told RT exclusively.

That shows the strength of the blockchain technology, he said, adding “We had hopes the balance of the 'lost' Mt. Gox coins could be recovered as well.”

According to him, Radtke was found dead shortly after a Japanese court was advised of the finding. “Her team and others associated with the effort disappeared. Websites closed down. This is a frightening development. That person and that team, me included, were frightened off.”

A cryptocurrency exchange in South Korea said it is shutting down and filing for bankruptcy after it was hacked for the second time this year. It lost 17 percent of its assets in the cyberattack.

The loss at the Mt. Gox exchange was judged by some investigators to have been a cyberheist, but it remained unsolved and pummeled bitcoin prices at the time. It was a significant setback for bitcoin with the value of the cryptocurrency plunging to $440 after Mt. Gox went offline. The value of bitcoin then slid to a 3-month low after the currency reached record highs above $1000 at the end of November 2014.

“Think about what a successful return of Mt. Gox's stolen bitcoins would have done to the value of bitcoin in the spring of 2014?” said Mook, adding “We would have seen $10,000 per bitcoin by that summer.”

However, Mook insists the case "does not change the nature of the blockchain technology or of bitcoin. It merely delays its adoption."�

The exchange’s bankruptcy has prompted Japan’s government to decide how to treat bitcoin, with local regulators starting licensing cryptocurrency exchanges. Japan has become the first country to regulate digital currency exchanges at the national level.

The Japanese regulations have required banks and other businesses to verify identities, keep records and report suspicious transactions.

Meanwhile, a group of Mt. Gox creditors has recently urged a Tokyo court to allow the exchange to emerge from bankruptcy now that its bitcoins have rocketed in value to more than $3 billion. They argued the 40-fold price surge since the exchange’s collapse means the company’s assets now dwarf its liabilities. However, depositors raise fears bitcoin’s recent rally would allow its disgraced former chief executive Mark Karpeles to emerge as a multibillionaire.

Karpeles who’s currently fighting charges of embezzlement in Tokyo, controls the company that owns almost 90 percent of Mt. Gox. At the current bitcoin price, Mt. Gox could meet all its liabilities and, under Japanese law, Karpeles would then receive his share of the surplus, a theoretical fortune worth well in excess of $2 billion.

Mongolia completely repays debt of Chinggis Bond www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/ On January 5, Mongolia paid off debt of Chinggis Bond as Prime Minister U.Khurelsukh confirmed debt repayment transaction of the Chinggis Bond at the Ministry of Finance.

Coal transport in route Tavantolgoi and Gashuuunsukhait runs normally www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/ Coal transport in route Tavantolgoi and Gashuuunsukhait now runs normally.

Introducing Mongolia's new biometric e-passports www.news.mn

From 1 January, the Mongolian National Registration and Statistics Office has begun to change Mongolian travel passports to biometric e-passports. The cabinet initiated the changes to Mongolian passports to speed up clearance through immigration and for the prevention of identity fraud.

Large silver reserve discovered in Inner Mongolia www.xinhuanet.com

HOHHOT, Jan. 4 (Xinhua) -- A large silver reserve has been found in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, local authorities said Thursday.

Severe air pollution chokes Mongolia amid harsh winters www.trtworld.com

Air pollution in China and India often makes international headlines, but in one country air quality is even worse.

Government to buy 49 per cent share of Erdenet Mining Corporation www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/ The Government made a decision to buy 49 percent shares of Erdenet Mining Corporation and Mongolrostsvestmet LLC on its January 4 irregular meeting. 

Asiamoney best bank awards 2017: Mongolia www.euromoney.com

Khan Bank is an outlier in Mongolia in many ways. It has a diversified and international – by local standards – investor base that includes Japan-based Sawada Holdings and the IFC, the private-sector arm of the World Bank. And it is both big and small. Big, in that it has more assets ($2.9 billion) than any of its domestic commercial banking rivals, an impressive digital banking presence, a solid priority banking service that it extends to mass-affluent customers and a growing army of corporate customers, ranging from mining giants to small and medium-sized firms. It reported returns on its equity and assets of, respectively, 17.5% and 1.99% in the third quarter of 2017, handily beating all of its top-tier peers. It is also regularly more profitable than them, and made a net profit of Tug101 billion ($41.4 million) through the first nine months of 2017, a year-on-year rise of 43%. But Khan Bank is also proud to be small, in that it focuses on the little guy and does it well. Khan has more retail customers – 2.4 million in a country of barely 3 million people – than any of its main rivals. It reaches them via a growing network of 537 branches and more than 1,000 ATMs. Khan Bank’s customers range from camel herders working alone in some of the harshest terrain on Earth to some of Mongolia’s largest companies. And it strives to treat them all equally.