Gujarat’s shipbuilding company ABG Shipyard has been accused of country’s biggest banking scam. A conglomerate of 28 banks has been defrauded to the tune of Rs 22,842 crore by the company. Amid the ongoing political allegations and counter-allegations in this case, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Tuesday said that the bank account of private shipping firm ABG Shipyard was declared as Non-Profitable Assets (NPA) (non-profitable assets) according to the State Bank of India (SBI) in 2013. ) and this happened when the Congress-led UPA government was in power.
The central agency said in a statement that as per the complaint of the bank (SBI), the NPA is Rs 22,842 crore and most of the disbursement took place between 2005 and 2012 by a consortium of 28 banks led by ICICI Bank and in this SBI was also involved. The CBI, citing forensic audit of the firm from 2012 to 2017, said that the company was also referred by ICICI Bank to the National Company Law Tribunal in Ahmedabad on August 1, 2017 for the corporate insolvency resolution process.
However, several banks had declared the accounts of ABG Shipyard as frauds during the financial year 2019-2020, the agency said. The probe agency cited withdrawal of general consent by the states as the reason behind the delay in registering the cases. The agency’s statement said that the withdrawal of general consent to CBI by some states had made it more challenging to register bank fraud cases.
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CBI in its statement said that more than 100 high value bank fraud cases could not be registered due to withdrawal of general consent under Section 6 of the DSPE Act. Let us tell you that eight states including Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Kerala and Mizoram have withdrawn consent from the CBI. Except Mizoram, all the states are ruled by opposition parties.
On Sunday (February 13), the CBI has registered an FIR against ABG Shipyard Limited and its then Chairman and Managing Director Rishi Kamlesh Agarwal among others in the country’s biggest bank fraud case. The case was registered in connection with an alleged fraud of over Rs 22,842 crore from a consortium of banks led by State Bank of India, officials said on Saturday. This is the biggest bank fraud case ever registered by the CBI.
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday defended the time taken by five years to file the first report in the ABG Shipyard loan fraud case, saying the time taken to detect the fraud is less than normal. Sitharaman said the loan to ABG was given during the Congress-led UPA regime and the account also became an NPA in 2013 itself. He said that all the banks had restructured the loans given to the company in March 2014 but it could not be recovered.
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