Four years after the Supreme Court first directed the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to disclose a list of India?s wilful defaulters, the central bank has finally complied.
In response to a Right to Information (RTI) application filed by The Wire in May 2019, the RBI has released a list of 30 major wilful defaulters.
For over ten years, the RBI has denied RTI applicants this information arguing that it would be against the economic interests of the country and its ?fiduciary relationship? with the banks disallows it from doing so.
Total funded advances outstanding to these 30 companies ? along with the amount the banks have written off so far ? adds up to over Rs 50,000 crore.
To put this in perspective, as of December 2018, over 11,000 companies had willfully defaulted on amounts worth over Rs 1.61 lakh crore, according to TransUnion Cibil data.
The RBI defines a borrower as a ?wilful defaulter? if the company has not met repayment obligations despite having the capacity to do so. While a ?wilful default? tag does not necessarily imply wrong-doing on the part of the promoters, the classification is also used
while referring to loan fraud cases, where the borrower has diverted the loan for purposes other than those initially stated.
The table below, therefore, is a list of borrowers flagged as ?wilful defaulters? by banks. The amounts of money given in the table is the sum of ?funded advances outstanding? and amount ?prudentially/technical written-off? as on April 30, 2019.
The data does not contain total bad loans or non-performing assets of these wilful? defaulter accounts.
Many of the names on the list are well known ? Gitanjali Gems, Rotomac Global, Zoom Developers, Deccan Chronicle Holdings, Winsome Diamonds, REI Agro, Siddhi Vinayak Logistics and Kudos Chemie. All these companies, or their promoters, have been slapped with cases by either the Central Bureau of Investigation or the Enforcement Directorate over the past five years.
The wilful defaulter list also contains the names of other known companies, where it is unclear if there has been any wrong-doing on the part of the promoters.?These include: ABG Shipyard, Ruchi Soya Industries, Hanung Toys and Textiles, S Kumars Nationwide and KS Oils Ltd.?
Information Source: Thewire