The new president of Nippon Credit Bank, which was nationalized earlier this month, promised on Friday that the bank will strive to quickly regain financial health and shake off government control.

Under the requirements of the financial reconstruction law, NCB will be obliged to quickly map out plans to resolve its heavy load of bad loans and streamline its operations, new NCB president Takuya Fujii said. "It is truly regrettable that NCB is faced with a situation like this," he said. "But we will continue our business with our sound customers, with an aim to end state control as soon as possible."

On Friday, the government-backed Deposit Insurance Corp. formally appointed Fujii, former head of the Bank of Japan's Currency Issue Department, as president of NCB.

DIC also approved the appointment of Motohiko Kusano, a senior NCB executive, and Hiroshige Wagatsuma, a high-ranking Industrial Bank of Japan official, to the two vice presidential posts. In addition, it appointed Yoshinobu Kotera, a senior official of Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, as a managing director.

The new NCB executives had been named earlier this week by the newly established Financial Reconstruction Commission, led by state minister Hakuo Yanagisawa.

Also on Friday, DIC disbursed a total of 200 billion yen in loans to NCB to aid it in maintaining its daily operations, Fujii said.

The new executives are focusing on differentiating healthy borrowers from problem borrowers and on disposing the massive amount of nonperforming loans, Fujii said.

NCB will design a wide-scale restructuring plan based on the massive restructuring program it announced in April 1997, which included a pullout from overseas operations and closure of its money-losing nonbank affiliates, Fujii said.