Legal Aspects of the Malaysian Financial System

• Main Author: Nik Norzrul Thani (Author)
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: Petaling Jaya Sweet & Maxwell Asia 2001; ©2001
• Subjects: Commercial finance companies > Law and legislation > Malaysia; Banking law > Malaysia; Financial institutions > Law and legislation > Malaysia
• Online Access: Click Here to View Status and Holdings.

 In Malaysia, the emergence of a formal and comprehensive regulatory system for financial institutions can be traced to 1959, the year its Central Bank was established. With the setting up of the Central Bank, a regulatory system centering on it and operated and fostered by it was put in place to control and supervise the commercial banks. From 1969, the regulatory system branched out to cover another group of financial institutions, the finance companies. Merchant banks came on the scene in the early 1970s. The Central Bank soon placed these under some informal measure of control and made this mode formal in 1979. The regulatory system developed another branch of control in 1983 to cater for Islamic banks as they began to emerge. This book attempts a detailed study of the regulatory system in Malaysia as it applies to these financial institutions. More specifically, the book will examine the important regulations individually with respect to each category of these institutions, their development over the years, the reasons underlying their introduction, implementation and change, their relevance and appropriateness, and their effectiveness. The adequacy of the regulatory system is considered in the light of a host of financial scandals and collapses in the past. Chapter 2 traces the historical development & regulatory structure of the country's financial system. The role of the Central Bank as a regulatory authority is discussed in chapter 3. Supervision and control of the commercial & merchant banks is discussed in chapter 4 and 5 respectively. Chapter 6 analyses the supervisory regime of the finance companies, whilst chapter 7 focuses on Islamic banking in Malaysia. In chapter 8, general provisions of supervision and control which have not been discussed in the preceding chapters are examined. Chapter 9 deals with the regulatory structure of the international offshore financial centre in Labuan. The concluding chapter analyses the overall assessment of the book.