Asserting their supremacy, the Pragati Panel led by the outgoing Chairman Vasant Gite and director Sohanlal Bhandari has made a clean sweep of the elections of Maharashtra based Nashik Merchants Cooperative Bank.
The elections were held on Sunday and the results were announced late evening on Monday. The Pragati Panel candidates, who fought the elections of the bank under the Jeepgadi election symbol, have received 45000 votes.
The outgoing Chairman Vasant Gite received 49,688 votes while Sohanlal Bhandari got 49,531 votes.
The bank board consists of 21 directors out of which 18 are from General category, 2 reserved for women and a seat for SC/ST. The elections were held for only 19 seats for which 24 candidates were in the race. The two women reserved seats were earlier elected unopposed and were also won by the Pragati Panel.
Meanwhile, talking to Indian Cooperative Sohanlal Bhandari said, “Our panel won the elections of the bank with full majority and we are very thankful to our board members who reposed faith in us. We will not dash their expectations”, he said.
“We are also looking forward to taking the bank to newer heights and in the next five years we are planning to give the benefits to our customers on the lines of Private and Nationalized banks. We will reduce the interest rate on the loans as well as increase the interest rate on the deposits”, said Bhandari who is also the former Chairman of the bank.
He further added, we have also set a target to achieve a business mix of more than Rs 5,000 crore. Though, in our bank’s elections the party politics do not matter. We are having elected directors from all the parties including NCP, Congress, BJP and Shiv Sena. We all will work together in the interest of the members.
The elected directors include, Vasant Gite, Sohanlal Bhandari, Hemant Dhatrak, Ganesh Gite, Mahendra Burad, Bhanudas Chaudhary, Narendra Pawar, Hitendra Chajed, Prakash Dayma, Subhash Nahar, Harish Lodha, Lalitkumar Modi, Vijay Sane, Avinash Gothi, Ashok Sonje, Pradulla Sancheti, Rajan Thakre and Devendra Patil.
The majority of directors are from the outgoing board and elections have been held for the next five years.
Meanwhile, the elections of Chairman and Vice-Chairman will be held in a couple of days.
Namco Bank has a business mix of Rs 2800 crore and it earned a net profit of Rs 34.33 crore in the last financial year. The bank has a network of 80 branches.