In 2005, the last full year before the firm's initial ICBC investment, Goldman ranked fifth.
Bank SinoPac spokeswoman Chen Ting-ju declined to disclose details of the deal with ICBC.
As for the 6% ICBC stake, it would now be worth five times as much.
On Wednesday, the first day of 2013 trading, ICBC rose 3.64 percent in intraday.
Yet ICBC has limited influence with Standard Bank, with only a couple of directors on its board.
The one thing SinoPac won't get, though, is exclusive access to ICBC's distribution channels in China, Mr. Chang said.
Monday's sale is Goldman's sixth and final sale of ICBC shares, a person close to the Wall Street bank said.
Across the Sea of Japan in China, ICBC is the largest and most profitable commercial bank in the world.
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Allianz and American Express, the two other foreign firms that bought into ICBC in 2006, sold stakes last year too.
Goldman's investment in ICBC, which was one of the first Chinese lenders to accept foreign investors as shareholders, has been lucrative.
For SinoPac, one clear benefit would be tapping ICBC's network of bank branches to raise its profile in China, analysts said.
But maybe Goldman, as a strategic partner armed with intimate knowledge about ICBC, decided that now was the time to trim exposure.
Volatility in ICBC's shares led Goldman to report a full-year net loss in Asia in 2011, its first since the 2008 financial crisis.
That deal still awaits regulatory approval, ICBC spokesman Wang Zhenning said on Monday, as well as the formalization of the new bank-investment rules.
And ICBC's board got a new member: John Thornton, who retired as Goldman's co-president in 2003 to teach at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Since then, the ICBC broker-dealer in the U.S. has focused on clearing trades of Treasury bonds and other types of fixed-income securities for clients.
The Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong rose by 0.75% to end the morning at 23, 514.1, led by banks such as ICBC, which climbed 1.4%.
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With new capital rules looming, and China's banking system grappling with slowing profit growth and the potential for more bad loans, the ICBC sale appeared inevitable, they said.
Since it was launched in December 2010 through this summer, the ICBC has an estimated 1.7 million accounts, with an accumulation of more than 12, 000 kilograms of gold.
In the longer term, the ICBC unit hopes to use that business as a base to get into other areas such as underwriting securities in the U.S. market.
And like Western firms' cross-border investments into Chinese banks, Goldman's ICBC stake never fulfilled its promise as a potential gateway to a much bigger slice of the investment-banking market.
Yet although they remain tiny compared with Chinese giants like ICBC and China Construction Bank, there is often more than a whiff of Beijing about the Indian state lenders.
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While ICBC has consistently been the most-profitable big state-owned Chinese bank in recent years, the country's entire banking sector is grappling with slowing profit growth and a potential for more bad loans.
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