Home ›› 05 Jan 2022 ›› Front
Bangladesh Bank has allowed the scam-hit Janata Bank to reschedule defaulted loans of AnonTex Group violating its own rules and regulations.
On Tuesday, the state-owned bank obtained a no-objection certificate (NOC) from the central bank to reschedule defaulted loans amounting to Tk 3,742 crore of the company.
By doing so, the BB gave in the garment manufacturer’s proposal made around a year back to reschedule the loans by providing a lower down payment than the actual amount fixed by the central bank.
Sixteen subsidiaries of the group now need to pay only Tk 86 crore as a down payment under the easy terms and conditions, said a BB official seeking anonymity.
This is a clear violation of the BB’s rules as the central bank, in a probe report in 2018, found huge loan irregularities and involvement of money laundering activities of 22 subsidiaries operated by the AnonTex Group.
According to the Bangladesh Bank’s guidelines on loan rescheduling, “when a borrower asks for rescheduling of loans, the bank must meticulously examine the causes as to why the loan has become non-performing.”
“If it is detected from such review that the borrower has diverted funds elsewhere or the borrower is a habitual loan defaulter, the bank must not consider the application for loan rescheduling and shall take all legal steps for recovery of the loans,” said the regulation.
However, another high official of the central bank argued that the BB allowed the rescheduling of defaulted loans after the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) found no irregularities in the loans taken by the AnonTex from Janata Bank.
In sharp contrast to the logic, a handful of BB officials expressed their dissatisfaction over the central bank’s contradictory move.
“This has been done under the pressure of the vested group,” one of them told The Business Post.
When contacted, BB spokesperson Md Serajul Islam said that he was not aware of the issue.
Janata Bank Managing Director Md Abdus Salam Azad could not be reached by phone despite several attempts.
“We applied to Bangladesh Bank to reschedule the group’s defaulted loans and the central bank might have approved the proposal,” Janata Bank Chairman SM Mahfuzur Rahman told the Business Post, however.
“Regularizing AnonTex’s defaulted loan does not mean that its offenses will be forgiven,” he said.
“The regulations of the government are constantly changing and we’re regularizing the AnonTex’s defaulted loans as part of the process,” said Rahman.
Janata Bank proposed the BB seeking a NOC to reschedule the defaulted loans of the company on November 19, 2021, around 10 months after AnonTex Group applied to Janata Bank for rescheduling its large amount of bad loans.
The garment manufacturer proposed the state-owned bank reschedule facility by paying only 2 per cent down payment, however, a defaulter needs to pay 10 to 50 per cent as per the rules.
A few weeks after receiving the company’s proposal, the bank took the issue to its board of directors’ meeting and approved AnonTex’s proposal.
Between 2010 and 2015, twenty-two subsidiaries of AnonTex Group were given about Tk 3,527.9 crore in loans by Janata Bank, which is more than 25 per cent of the lender’s capital base, in violation of the single borrower exposure limit set in the Bank Company Act 1991.
As of September last year, the total loans held by the Group stand at Tk 6,528.6 crore. Of the figure, some Tk 2,800 crore was defaulted and rescheduled in 2019.
Now the 16-year-old garment manufacturer gets the scope to regularise the rest of the loans.
When asked, AnonTex Group Managing Director Md Younus Badal declined to make any comment on the issue.
