K
Kojiro Sasaki
Guest
Saturday November 13, 2010
Disowned - runaway debtor youths
By RACHAEL KAM
[email protected]
KUALA LUMPUR: Two 24-year-olds ran away from home, leaving their families to deal with huge debts they had taken from loan sharks. The disgusted parents have now disowned them. Technician Leong Kim Seng, 53, said that he used a lot of his savings to settle his 24-year-old daughter Seed Ling's debts which had risen to over RM15,000.
"I worked hard to pay for her studies, but she did not finish her diploma in broadcasting and asked for a few more thousand (ringgit) for a beauty course," said Leong who announced during a press conference chaired by MCA Public Services and Complaints Department head Datuk Michael Chong that he had disowned his daughter.
With this move, he hoped the loan sharks would stop threatening him and splashing red paint on his house. He added that his wife had died of lung cancer last year. He has a 22-year-old son living with him. Leong said Seed Ling, who worked as a promoter at a boutique in Bukit Bintang here, also had large unsettled credit card bills and left home on Sept 20, taking along her branded handbags and clothes, a computer, a printer and a DVD player.
At the same press conference, 51-year-old single mother Chai Siew Khian disowned her son Lim Gat Chun, 24, who owed about RM69,000 to loan sharks. "Gat Chun ran away a month ago. We have no idea where he is now. We have nothing to do with the loans," said Chai, whose family paid RM7,000 in March to settle his debts but they seemed to be "snowballing". Both Leong and Chai had lodged police reports respectively against the loan sharks for threatening their families.
Chong said that if the borrowers ran away from their problem, his department would release their photographs to the media. Besides these two cases, the department has received four similar cases of family members being disowned. Two wives disowned their husbands and two children disowned their fathers. To date, Chong said the department had received a total of 261 loan shark cases involving about RM26.2mil.
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