Loan Offer to Orange County Looks Like Hoax

HONG KONG — For bankrupt Orange County, it was an offer that sounded too good to be true. And a proposal by a mysterious Taiwan firm to bail the county out of its $1.7-billion hole seems to be just that.

Earlier this week, news surfaced that a Taiwanese outfit called Huang Neumg Industry had expressed interest in loaning Orange County $3 billion at a bargain-basement 4% interest rate. Toshio Kojima, the firm’s “international director,” made the pitch in a letter to an Orange County official.

Most state and local officials expressed reservations about the proposal, but they were curious nonetheless.

The company’s address and phone number actually belong to a hotel in Kaohsiung, an industrial port city in southern Taiwan, that is used by business travelers. Nobody named Toshio Kojima, or a company called Huang Neumg Industry, was registered at the hotel Friday.

A government official in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital and the center for the country’s financial institutions, described the proposal as laughable.

“First of all, it is illegal for anyone but the central bank to make loans in Taiwan,” the official said, joking that “the central bank of Taiwan might consider such a loan . . . if California were to become a sovereign power and officially recognize Taiwan as an independent state.”

Times staff writer Eric Bailey in Sacramento contributed to this story.