Loans to ABG Shipyard turned NPAs prior to 2014: FM

ABG Shipyard Limited, its former chairman and managing director Rishi Kamlesh Agarwal and others, were booked by the Central Bureau of Investigation for allegedly cheating a consortium of two dozen lenders led by ICICI Bank.

New Delhi: Taking a dig at the Congress party over the ABG Shipyard bank fraud case, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the ABG Shipyard account turned NPA during the erstwhile UPA regime and the banks took lesser than normal time to detect the fraud perpetrated by the shipping firm.

"In this particular case with that kind of a measurement, actually, I should give credit to the banks, they've taken lesser than what is normally an average time to detect these kinds of frauds," Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said at a press conference on Monday after addressing the members of the RBI Board.

She also added that normally banks take over 55 months of time to detect such cases and initiate follow-up actions.

Recently, the ABG Shipyard Limited, its former chairman and managing director Rishi Kamlesh Agarwal and others were booked by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for allegedly cheating a consortium of two dozen lenders led by ICICI Bank.

ABG Shipyard fraud is much higher than the one perpetrated by Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi, who allegedly cheated the Punjab National Bank (PNB) of around Rs 14,000 crore through the issuance of fraudulent Letters of Undertaking (LoUs).

The minister also said that during the NDA regime, the financial health of banks has improved and they are in a position to raise funds from the market.

Meanwhile, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das during the presser asserted that RBI's inflation projections are quite robust. He further said the momentum of inflation from October 2021 onwards is on a downward slope.

"It's primarily the statistical reasons the base effect, which is leading to higher inflation especially in the third quarter, and the same base effect will play in different ways in the coming months," Das said.

READ:ABG Shipyard fraud: SBI says no delay in filing of case, ICICI Bank was leader in consortium