The Punjab National Bank has revealed that over 1,142 defaulters across the country have defaulted to the tune of Rs 25,090.3 crore. The bank has initiated recovery proceedings by filing suits against 1,108 defaulters out of them. The amount they are looking to recover from these cases is Rs 23,879.8 crore.
The rest 34 owe the bank Rs 1,210.5 crore. However, no suits have been filed against them so far. Some of them are dated several years ago and recoveries are still pending.
The Reserve Bank of India has been informed of the status of all the defaulter accounts, as mentioned in a report in IANS.
The defaulter list includes accounts owing Rs 25 lakh or above to PNB through all its branches across the states. The highest number of defaulter accounts has been tracked from Maharashtra, Punjab, Delhi, Chandigarh, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.
Additionally, some companies that availed some of these loans are shown as registered abroad, while some registered in India have taken loans from PNB’s overseas branches.
The list runs past Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi who incurred a Rs 14,000 crore dent on the bank. Kingfisher boss Vijay Mallya also features in the list. He owes Rs 597.4 crore to the bank on the defunct airline’s account. Other defaulters include Kudos Chemie Ltd., Chandigarh for Rs 1,301.8 crore, Winsome Diamonds & Jewellery Ltd for Rs 899.7 crore, Jas Infrastructure & Power Ltd., Kolkata for Rs 410.9 crore, Zoom Developers Pvt. Ltd. Mumbai/Indore Rs 410.1 crore.
The All India Bank Employees Association General Secretary CH Venkatachalam said that it is not confined to one bank and all banks have such bad loan accounts. A bulk of defaulters is corporates or big companies and a forensic audit of all must be carried out.
