The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has admitted to writing offa staggering amount of Rs 68,607-crores due from 50 Top Wilful Defaulters,including absconding diamantaire Mehul Choksi, according to a reply under RTI.
Prominent RTI activist Saket Gokhale had filed an RTI queryseeking details of the 50 Top Wilful Defaulters and their current loans statustill February 16.
“I filed this RTI because Finance Minister NirmalaSitharaman and Minister of State for Finance Anurag Thakur, but they hadrefused to reply to this starred question asked in parliament by Congress MPRahul Gandhi, in the last budget session, on Feb 16, 2020,” Gokhale toldIANS.
Disclosing what the government didn’t, the RBI’s CentralPublic Information Officer Abhay Kumar provided the replies on Saturday (April24), with several startling revelations in the ‘diamond-studded list’, saidGokhale.
The RBI said that this amount (Rs 68,607-crore) comprisingoutstanding and the amounts technically/prudentially Written Off, tillSeptember 30, 2019.
“The apex bank also declined to provide the relevantinformation on overseas borrowers citing a Supreme Court judgement of December16, 2015,” Gokhale told IANS.
Topping the list is Choksi’s scam-hit company, GitanjaliGems Limited which owed Rs.5,492 crore, besides other group companies, GiliIndia Ltd. and Nakshatra Brands Ltd. which had taken loans of Rs 1,447 croreand Rs 1,109 crore, respectively.
Choksi is currently a citizen of Antigua & BarbadosIsles, while his nephew and another absconder diamond trader Nirav Modi is inLondon.
The second in the list is REI Agro Ltd., with an amount ofRs 4,314 crores, and its directors Sandip Jhujhunwala and Sanjay Jhunjhunwalawho are already under the scanner of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) sinceover a year.
The next on the list in the Rs 4,000-crore bracket isabsconding diamantaire Jatin Mehta’s Winsome Diamonds & Jewellery owing Rs4,076 crore and which is being probed by the Central Bureau of Investigationfor various bank frands.
In the Rs 2,000-crore category, there is the Kanpur-basedwriting instruments giant, Rotomac Global Pvt. Ltd., part of the famed Kotharigroup, which owed Rs 2,850 crore.
The others in this category include: Kudos Chemie, Punjab(Rs.2,326 crore), Baba Ramdev and Balkrishna’s group company Ruchi SoyaIndustries Ltd., Indore (Rs.2,212 crore), and Zoom Developers Pvt. Ltd.,Gwalior (Rs.2,012 crore).
There are 18 companies in the Rs.1K-segment with someprominent names like Harish R. Mehta’s Ahmedabad-based Forever PreciousJewellery & Diamonds Pvt. Ltd. (Rs.,1962 crore), and absconder liquor baronVijay Mallya’s defunct Kingfisher Airlines Ltd. (Rs 1,943 crore).
Another 25 companies fall in the sub-1K-crore category withoutstandings ranging from Rs 605 crore to Rs 984 crore, either individually oras group companies.
Six among the 50 Top Wilful Defaulters are connected withthe glittering diamond and/or gold jewellery industries.
“A majority of them have defaulted prominentnationalist banks over the past several years and many of them are eitherabsconding or facing action by various probe agencies and some are underlitigation,” Gokhale said.
No industry is sacrosanct as the top 50 willful defaultersare spread across various sectors of the economy including IT, infrastructure,power, gold-diamond jewellery, pharma, etc.