Probe nexus in writing off bad loans: Bank union

Chennai, May 6 (IANS) Releasing a list of 406 huge bank loans amounting to Rs.70,300 crore that went bad, the All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA) Tuesday demanded declaring wilful default a criminal offence and investigation to probe the nexus.

"The total non-performing assets (NPA) of public sector banks September 2013 was Rs.2.36 lakh crore. The bad loans restructured and shown as good is Rs.3.25 lakh crore," general secretary C.H.Venkatachalam told reporters here Tuesday.

Terming this as a daylight robbery of people's money, he said the government should order investigation to probe nexus and collusion between the bank employees and the borrowers in classifying loans into bad.

He said the recovery laws should be amended to speed up the process of recovering the bad loans by the banks.

According to Venkatachalam, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) should publish the list of bank loan defaulters periodically.

He said the bad loans written off during the past 13 years totals around Rs.2.04 lakh crore.

Venkatachalam said the union would publish a larger list of around 3,000 bad loan accounts.