Investors in LIC's insurance and other schemes are receiving a lower rate of return because LIC is subsidising incompetence at best and malfeasance at worst in institutions such as IDBI Bank and IL&FS, says Jaimini Bhagwati.
'One by one we are seeing these private banks taking people's money and mismanaging it.' 'In the last 30 years, 30 private banks have collapsed.' 'Nationalise all banks so that people's money is safe.'
'Some farmers know when elections are due.' 'Before that, they take loans.' 'They then ask their farmer unions for loan waivers and the political party who shouts first about a loan waiver (gets the votes).'
'Should the government be in the business of running banks?' 'Particularly when it does not have the fiscal strength to continuously infuse capital into such banks?'
He said that the Congress government has fulfilled 98 per cent of the promises made in its manifesto and the next manifesto will be prepared on the basis of the 'Vision 2030' document.
Kumaraswamy met representatives of farmers groups and progressive peasants to discuss the problems faced by them.
He said trust and confidence were the backbone of any financial system and one should never underestimate the power of ethics and values.
The RBI is exploring ways to allow banks more flexibility in loan restructuring.
The Chennai high court on Friday issued a notice to Congress party spokesperson Jayanthi Natarajan, acting on an affidavit seeking direction to probe a Rs 300 crore scam involving her. Natarajan is a Congress Member of Parliament from Tamil Nadu.The affidavit alleges that Natarajan facilitated a sizeable bank loan from Vijaya Bank by misusing her links with the Union government.Natarajan is also under legal scrutiny for allegedly owning 6,88,300 square feet land.
After the finance minister directed public sector banks to join the account aggregator (AA) ecosystem, 5-6 major ones, including State Bank of India (SBI) and Bank of Baroda are expected to go live by July-end. Sahmati, an industry alliance for the AA ecosystem, has been working with PSU banks to get them onboarded for quite some time now. So far, Union Bank of India and Punjab National Bank (PNB) have gone live on the AA ecosystem. While Union Bank has been live for a while, PNB went live earlier this month.
If indeed the gate opens for big industrial houses, the RBI needs to be smarter than them and demonstrate it through action, not reaction, observes Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
While law-abiding customers are harassed for KYC and have to comply with endless paperwork even to open and close accounts, DHFL could easily open nearly 260,000 fake home-loan accounts, reveals Debashis Basu.
Competition watchdog CCI has asked about two dozen banks and housing finance companies, including HDFC, ICICI Bank, and LICHF, to explain their imposing penalty on borrowers for pre-payment of home loans. The Competition Commission of India, according to official sources, has sent notices to major home loan players after examining a report of Director General (Investigations) which found evidences against banks for misusing their dominant position.
Companies don't have to be in the field to nudge people to return money they owe lenders.
'The government must find worthwhile private owners for some of the banks, increase the share of private sector banking in the system, and then ask the remaining government banks to face the discipline of the market and compete, or shrink into irrelevance,' says T N Ninan.
Proceeds of the crime had been siphoned off and laundered or concealed, or layered and integrated into the main financial system through the acquisition of properties. His wife Bindu Kapoor has been charged with being aware of the source of monies that were being routed through these companies.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday said it has arrested Karvy Stock Broking Limited (KSBL) CMD C Parthasarathy and group CFO G Krishna Hari in connection with a money laundering investigation linked to alleged diversion of clients' securities of over Rs 2,873 crore. The agency produced the two-- already lodged in central jail, Bengaluru after being arrested by the police-- before a special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court in Hyderabad on January 20 and on January 25 it remanded them to four days of ED custody from January 27-30, it said in a statement. The ED case, filed under the criminal provisions of the PMLA, is based on multiple Telangana Police FIRs filed by the HDFC Bank, few other banks and investors alleging clients' securities were illegally diverted by Karvy Stock Broking Ltd and these were later pledged with banks and non banking financial companies (NBFCs) for loans which were later "defaulted".
Prime Minister Narendra Modi Wednesday took the Congress to the cleaners over making the 2024 general elections about the protection of the Constitution, saying Indians voted on the plank only once when they threw out the Indira Gandhi government in 1977 after the Emergency.
Of the 2,562 customer complaints received between January 2020 and March 2021, a majority relate to illegal apps. At least two dozen suicide cases have been reported, perpetrated by the harassment by loan app operators, points out Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
'By not letting bankrupt banks fail, we have discouraged ordinary folk from taking precautions while choosing their bank or at least when they hear bad news about their bank,'says S Muralidharan, former MD, BNP Paribas.
The next phase is when factors such as prison conditions in India are likely to take centre-stage.
Move can also bring a huge change in the way business is done in India, where firms use multiple current accounts, often for even individual projects, making them difficult to monitor.
Banks, through the Indian Banks' Association, have urged RBI and credit information companies to maintain a database of wilful defaulters.
Going through the credit report regularly will make you aware of a number of issues. One is identity theft.
Capital markets regulator Sebi has penalised stock exchanges -- BSE and NSE -- for "laxity" on their part in detecting misuse of clients' securities worth Rs 2,300 crore by Karvy Stock Broking Ltd (KSBL). In two separate orders, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has imposed a fine of Rs 3 crore on BSE and Rs 2 crore on NSE. The matter relates to KSBL misutilising client securities worth Rs 2,300 crore, belonging to more than 95,000 clients, by pledging them from just one demat account. The funds raised against the pledge were used by KSBL for itself and its group entities.
The Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) has arrested a person who the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) said has emerged as the mastermind of the racket of incorporating a large number of shell companies with Chinese links in India.
Hyderabad police on Thursday arrested two senior executives of scam-hit Karvy Stock Broking Pvt Ltd for allegedly involving in diverting funds raised from banks by pledging clients' securities as collaterals. According to a police press release, Rajiv Ranjan Singh, chief executive officer and G. Krishna Hari chief financial officer of Karvy were arrested basing on a complaint by IndusInd bank.
She said I treated her like a bachchi. At another moment, she said I had gone to various people and 'bitched' about her. She also threatened to bring the entire matter to the PM's notice. A revealing excerpt from Subhash Chandra Garg's We Also Make Policy: An Insider's Account of How the Finance Ministry Functions.
About 300 fintech firms are under investigation by the ED for allegedly partnering 38 non-banking financial companies for predatory lending practices to charge borrowers high interest rates.
Accusing the Union government of using the central agencies to target leaders like former finance minister P Chidambaram and others, Kamal Nath expressed hope that the court will take a right decision in the case.
Beleaguered businessman Vijay Mallya on Thursday told the Supreme Court that banks have no right over the information of his overseas movable and immovable assets as he was an NRI since 1988.
Tata Sons, India's biggest business group, and firms controlled by billionaires Anil Ambani and Kumar Mangalam Birla are among the 26 companies that have applied for licences to open banks.
Subhash Shankar Parab, a key accused in the Rs 7,000 crore diamantaire Nirav Modi bank fraud case, was "deported" from Cairo on Tuesday after a long diplomatic and legal process, officials said in New Delhi. A CBI team had gone to Egypt's capital to bring back 50-year-old Parab, who was allegedly kept in illegal confinement in a Cairo suburb by Modi, the fugitive diamantaire, they said. The CBI had been chasing Parab, deputy general manager (finance) in Modi's Firestar Diamond and understood to be a key witness to the Letters of Undertaking (LoU) submitted to the Punjab National Bank (PNB) to siphon off over Rs 7,000 crore, they said.
Bank provides for Rs 7,178 crore, or 50 pf of the total amount of the Rs 14,356 crore scam, in the fourth quarter of 2017-18. The remaining amount will be covered in the three quarters of the current fiscal year.
The Enforcement Directorate has arrested the chairman and the managing director (MD) of Mumbai-based Omkar Realtors and Developers in connection with a money laundering case against them linked to the alleged loan fraud in Yes Bank, official sources said on Wednesday.
'Credit expansion is probably the quickest way to get the economy going again.' 'Easy credit is like a shot of nitro in a race car: In timely, small, quick, doses it can give a tremendous boost but carried to extreme it can destroy the engine,' points out S Muralidharan, former managing director, BNP Paribas.
Bankers pay a small price for their misdeeds, no matter how large the cost to their banks or to the economy at large, says TT Ram Mohan.
'I find the RBI edict to the Kotak Mahindra Bank to reduce Uday Kotak's shareholding very unreasonable,' says Sudhir Bisht.
A senior CBI official said Adani group is alleged to have 'over-invoiced' its loans to the tune of Rs 2,300 crore (Rs 23 billion) between 2011 and 2013.
The brand new bankruptcy process is being brazenly gamed by those with connections and money. The touts and fixers of the previous regime have been replaced by a new set close to this one, observes Debashis Basu.