China Cinda Asset Management Co, one of four companies formed in the 1990s to remove bad debt from the nation's banking system, plans to sell 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) of bonds in its first debt sale.

The company, in which UBS AG and Standard Chartered Plc are shareholders, plans to sell 5 billion yuan of three-year debt and the same amount of five-year bonds on Monday, according to a statement by the China Foreign Exchange Trade System.

Cinda's sale would be the first public bond issuance by any of the four asset managers the Chinese government set up in 1999 to reduce bad loans mounting at the country's biggest State-owned lenders, according data compiled by Bloomberg. Created with a 10-year mandate to clear up the bad loans, the asset managers have since expanded their businesses into underwriting sales of stocks and bonds, insurance and leasing.

Beijing-based Cinda bought more than 1 trillion yuan of non-performing loans, including about 390 billion yuan of bad loans from China Construction Bank Corp and China Development Bank Corp. Cinda had assets of 171.3 billion yuan as of last year, according to a credit rating report released on Wednesday.

China Daily-Agencies