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ICICI Bank's Rs 10k-cr bad loans under lens
13 Sep 2009, 0203 hrs IST, Anand Rawani, ET Bureau
NEW DELHI: The institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) has
raised questions about ICICI Bank’s home loans business and has sought
a
fresh central bank audit of a two-year-old sale deal of dud loans,
after a Mumbai-based chartered accountant spotted irregularities in
some loans.
“The regulator should re-audit assets sold to ARCIL,” ICAI president
Uttam Prakash Agarwal told SundayET, referring to the sale of bad home
loan assets worth over Rs 10,000 crore by the bank to the asset
reconstruction company.
ICICI Bank is accused of lending money for the purchase of some
apartments in a housing project in a Mumbai suburb, and in some cases
twice for the same set of apartments.
According to the chartered accountant who spotted irregularities, the
bank disbursed home loans for the purchase of 15 apartments in the
Ritu Paradise Project developed by S R Developers in Mumbai’s Mira
Road. Documents available with ICAI and in SundayET’s possession show
that double loans were issued by the Bank on some flats.
These loans were part of the block of bad loans sold to ARCIL, which
helps banks to free up capital by buying such loans and seeks to
recover them.
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Although the loan amount for these 15 flats were only in the region of
only Rs 2-3 crore, the accounting regulator is of the view that the
bank bears responsibility for selling off these bad loans to ARCIL
without verifying it.
A spokesman for ICICI Bank admitted that such an incident had taken
place. “When this asset was sold to ARCIL, this was not identified as
fraud. The builder fraudulently recreated the entire documentation and
sought finance. Such frauds are a challenge to the industry,” he said.
On the issue of loans being issued twice for the same property, the
ICICI spokesman said: “Since there is no central database, it is
almost impossible to track whether any loan has already been given
against a specific property.”
But ICAI said this episode exposed holes in the bank’s systems. “In
four cases, double loans were issued by ICICI Bank itself. This shows
the inability of the bank’s IT set up and its due diligence
mechanism,” Mr Agarwal said.
He added that the appointment of auditors in private sector banks
should also be done by RBI as in the case of public sector banks. “No
autonomy should be given to the management of the private sector
banks. In the past too, there were accounting issues and the recent
example is the fall of Global Trust Bank”, he said.
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