Despite signs of recovery as a result of the efforts put in by Mukund Abhyankar and his team, depositors of the Rupee Co-op Bank are getting impatient. A group of 70-80 depositors took out a morcha to the collector’s office in Pune demanding action against those willfully defaulting on loans, reports Pune Mirror.
After the new administrative board under Abhyankar got active getting OTS (One-Time-Settlement) on July 8, 2015, it has recovered Rs 45.92 crore from 99 cases. The team claimed that 200 more borrowers have come forward to settle their dues under the OTS, which will help the bank realise another Rs 70 crore.
Further, close to Rs 300 crore could be recovered with the help of district administrations of Raigarh, Pune and Kolhapur. There are 95 properties in these districts whose mortgage papers are with the bank.
The protesting depositors meanwhile have submitted a letter to the collector with the names of about 40 defaulters whose property could be attached. According to the letter, accessed by Mirror, there are 52 applications pending with the administration which, if acted upon, will yield a total of Rs 144 crore from the defaulters. Of these, applications with total recoverable value of Rs 125 crore are pending with the Pune district magistrate alone.
There are 6,22,000 depositors with the Rupee Bank in the state, of which about 60,000 reside in Pune. About 95 per cent of them have deposits of less than Rs 1 lakh, which is insured but remains out of bounds for them since February 2013, when the Reserve Bank of India placed the co-operative bank under restrictions citing poor financial health.
Meanwhile, in a curious case as reported by Times of India it has turned out that a Nagpur borrower offered to repay entire dues in one go. But the Rupee Bank is refusing to settle the account saying the Reserve Bank of India rules do not permit adjusting a part of the borrower’s deposit lying with the bank.
Dr Raju Deshmukh, who runs a city-based Suretech Hospital, has a cash credit line in hospital’s name against which he had drawn about Rs 65 lakh. After the Rupee Bank got into trouble, he has already repaid Rs 25 lakh of the amount. He is ready to repay the remaining Rs 40 lakh too in one go but wants part of this to be adjusted against a deposit of Rs 15 lakh made by his hospital with the bank some years ago. With interest accrued, the deposit is now worth about Rs 19 lakh. The branch manager, however, turned down the offer quoting the RBI rules.