Amid a rising number of frauds and loan defaults in banking system, the Prime Minister’s Office has called a meeting of Finance Ministry officials on Thursday to firm up measures to tackle such menaces. The Prime Minister’s Office in a meeting with top finance ministry officials on May 14 will review steps to check loan frauds, an official source said.
The Finance Ministry has already collected a comprehensive data on willful defaulters of public sector banks last month, sources said. They further said that instances of corporate frauds were on increase in the recent past, leading to a rise in bad loans. As per RBI data, gross NPAs of PSU banks have gone up to Rs2,60,531 crore as on December, 2014.
The top 30 defaulters are sitting on bad loans of Rs95,122 crore, which is more than one-third of the entire non-performing assets of public sector banks as on December 2014. In terms of percentage, it amounts to 36.5 per cent. The total number of NPA borrowers having Rs10 crore and above at the end of September 2014 stood at 2,897 with outstanding amount of Rs1,60,164 crore.