Peregrine Investments Holdings agreed to make a US$350 million loan to Indonesian taxi company Steady Safe at the centre of the investment bank's collapse - $90 million more than previously disclosed.
In his first interview since the announcement of Peregrine's collapse on Monday, the biggest shareholder in Steady Safe, Jopie Widjaja, said the agreement to extend the loan to $350 million was included in the terms of the credit arrangement struck last May.
Mr Widjaja - a 41-year-old Jakarta-born Chinese businessman - said his company had spent $265 million of the loan by the time Indonesia's currency collapse drove Peregrine under.
'Of course we want to pay it back, but we have a lot of work to do . . . it could be a burden for our company for a very long time,' Mr Widjaja said. 'They [Peregrine] gave us what we wanted . . . very unfortunately the market collapsed.' Although Indonesia was singled out by Peregrine chairman Philip Tose as the major factor behind the firm's demise, details are beginning to emerge about the depth of problems in the South Korean operations.
Dongbang Peregrine Securities, a Korean securities firm 44 per cent owned by Peregrine Investments, bought about $50 million of short-term debt instruments issued by Peregrine and a Korean clothing firm that went bankrupt on Wednesday.
The November transactions appear part of Peregrine's effort to raise money at a time when it faced desperate funding problems as banks cut credit lines.