mobanmarketFugitive diamond businessman and the owner of Gitanjali Gems, Mehul Choksi, has failed to repay loans worth Rs 7,848 crore to various banks, making him the single-largest wilful bank loan defaulter in the country.
Choksi, who fled India along with his nephew Nirav Modi in 2018 before the Punjab National Bank (PNB) scam surfaced, has been living in Antigua, where he has citizenship, ever since.
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Top loan defaulters in India
According to the data shared by the Minister Of State For Finance Bhagwat Karad in the Lok Sabha on Monday, Gitanjali Gems is followed by Era Infra Engineering (Rs 5,879 crore), Rei Agro (Rs 4,803 crore), Concast Steel and Power (Rs 4,596 crore), ABG Shipyard (Rs 3,708 crore), Frost International (Rs 3,311 crore), Winsome Diamonds and Jewellery (Rs 2,931 crore), Rotomac Global (Rs 2,893 crore), Coastal Projects (Rs 2,311 crore) and Zoom Developers (Rs 2,147 crore).
According to the data the top 50 wilful defaulters collectively owed Rs 92,570 crore to Indian banks as of March 31, 2022.
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NPAs of state-owned banks dropped
Data showed that the gross non-performing assets (NPAs) of state-owned banks had dropped by over Rs 3 lakh crore after peaking at Rs 8.9 lakh crore.
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Following RBI’s Asset Quality Review, the gross NPAs have come down Rs 5.41 lakh crore.
A wilful defaulter is a financial term used for borrowers who have the means to pay the loan back but don’t. These borrowers are debarred from any facility of banks or other financial institutions.
Rs 10.1 lakh crore loans written off
The Minister also said that banks had written off Rs 10.1 lakh crore loans.
India’s largest public sector bank State Bank of India, topped this list with Rs 2 lakh crore of write-offs, followed by Punjab National Bank (PNB) with Rs 67,214 crore.
Among private lenders, ICICI Bank wrote off the highest Rs 50,514 crore of loans, followed by HDFC at Rs 34,782 crore.
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Last week, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told the Parliament that NPAs, including those in respect of which complete provisioning has been made on completion of four years, are removed from the balance sheet of the bank concerned by way of the write-off.
Written off, not waived off
“Banks write off NPAs as part of their regular exercise to clean up their balance sheet, avail tax benefit and optimise capital, by RBI guidelines and policy approved by their boards. As per inputs from RBI, Scheduled Commercial Banks (SCBs) wrote off an amount of Rs 10,09,511 crore during the last five financial years,” she said.
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As borrowers of written-off loans continue to be liable for repayment and the process of recovery of dues from the borrower in written-off loan accounts continues, write-off does not benefit the borrower, she said.
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