THE write-off culture in the banking sector has got its pick exerting a bad practice during the last five years. This happened only due to corruption, misappropriation, politicization, mismanagement and irregularities seizing the country’s financial sector. This is another cause of concern after the scams that largely occurred in the state-owned banks. A Bangladesh Bank report said, four state-owned banks have written off loans of Tk 15,228 crore until March 2014 since 2002. Everywhere genuine difficulties of the loan takers are duly considered. But not for illegal gains of bank officials. It is not to be forgotten that banks are seen as business partners.
An English daily reported, bad loans of Tk 15,667 crore were written-off during the last five years constituting almost half of such loans erased by the banks from their balance sheets since the loan write-off system was introduced in 2002. Writing-off the bad loans has been attributed due to the relaxed policy introduced by Bangladesh Bank in 2013 to allow banks to get rid of bad loans having maturity of two years from previous five years. Bank-wise break up is Sonali Bank Tk 5,850 crore, Agrani Bank Tk 5,011 crore, Janata Bank Tk 3,348 crore and Rupali Bank Tk 1,019 crore. Twenty-seven of the 39 private banks waived bad loans of Tk 12,517 crore and four state-owned specialised banks waived Tk 3, 261 crore. All this proved that getting back the money was never an option in the first place.
What is disturbing is where big corruption is available big debts are easily written-off while in truly difficult situations banks have all the excuses not to help.
Though the central bank governor in 2010 pledged not to tolerate the culture of waiving default loans, but the ground reality proved that this has actually not been implemented and it just widens the loopholes of looting public money. The policy-makers are apparently seen engaged in tall-talks only to hide the culprits who are involved in fake business entities with fake address and thus qualified for loans in violation of rules. Politically influential quarters along with the corrupt bank officials are the active ones in the banking sector plundering not the money alone, but the holy trust of the depositors putting them in an unholy nexus. Banking sector has become one of the most corrupt sectors. More so when banks are government banks.
We want banks should be helpful partners of business. Banks are making huge profits for directors and shareholders. Profit making is not bad but modern banks should not be ‘Kabuliwalas’ to collect not only the debt money but also full interest without caring how impossible the situation is.
