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TAIPEI: Primus Financial Holdings is "very confident" it will get approval from Taiwan's regulators to buy American International Group's Taiwan insurance unit, a top executive from the investment firm said yesterday.

Primus' co-chief executive Wing-fai Ng told Reuters in an interview that it planned to turn Nan Shan into a global brand name, listing in Taiwan in three years, then Hong Kong, and then the US.

Primus, founded by former top Citi Asia banker Robert Morse, is in the final bidding race with the Carlyle Group and Bain Capital for a deal estimated at about $2 billion for Nan Shan. The unit is the richest Asian asset that AIG has put up for sale in its effort to repay a US government bail out.

Primus has teamed up with Hong Kong battery maker China Strategic. That partership has spawned considerable doubts among some analysts that the joint bid will win approval from Taiwan regulators. These analysts believe Taiwan regulators may conclude Primus is not interested in a long term commitment to Nan Shan and that the partnership may be receiving backing from mainland investors.

However, Ng said in an interview in Taipei: "We are very confident we'll be approved. We have no mainland shareholder money."

Taiwan has opened some industrial sectors to mainland investment, but the island is keen to exclude financial sector investment from the mainland.

AIG, once the biggest US insurer until it was bailed out by the US government last year, selected Primus and three other buyer groups to enter the final bidding round, which sources have said is due by Friday.

Carlyle has paired with Taiwan's Fubon Financial, Bain Capital has teamed up with Chinatrust Financial, while Cathay Financial, Taiwan's top listed financial holding firm, is bidding on its own.

Hong Kong-based Primus would invest $500 million into Nan Shan. It will keep the Taiwan's insurer's staff, Ng said. Nan Shan Life's sales force of 38,000 agents is the second largest in Taiwan.

The $2 billion price tag, widely seen as unreasonably high, and growing pension disputes with Nan Shan's union could once again sink AIG's plan to sell Nan Shan after an attempted sale was scuppered earlier this year, sources in Taipei and Hong Kong have said.

More ideally, AIG could sell Nan Shan for $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion as it could record losses in 2009 and 2010, after reporting a loss of NT$46.7 billion ($1.4 billion) in 2008, said a source with direct knowledge of the deal. The source declined to be identified, because the bidding process is supposed to be confidential. The bid underscores the efforts of Primus, a new $1 billion investment firm, to build an insurance platform across Asia.

"From an investment return point of view, it does not make sense to invest in Taiwan. Taiwan's financial industry is the least profitable in Asia," Ng said in Taipei.

"Bob (Robert Morse) is desperate to build an aircraft - a pan-Asia group. We plan to use Nan Shan as a base and expand to Hong Kong, Malaysia and Japan," said the co-chief executive.

In April when the firm was launched, Morse told Reuters that he hoped Primus some day can compete against major banks like Citigroup, Morse's former long-time employer.

Reuters

(HK Edition 08/26/2009 page2)