Mumbai : A senior finance ministry official on Monday described the arrests of top officials of state-run Bank of Maharashtra (BoM) last week as an “aberration” and said it should not be construed that “bankers are being hounded”.
The economic offences wing of the Pune police last Wednesday arrested BoM’s managing director Ravindra Marathe, executive director Rajendra Gupta, zonal manager Nityanand Deshpande, former chairman Sushil Muhnoot and three other officials in a cheating case lodged against real estate developer DS Kulkarni and his wife.
The arrests had riled the entire banking sector so much that national bankers’ lobby IBA held an emergency meeting last Friday here and called for setting up an external panel to give clearance to arrest senior bankers.
Rakesh Mohan blames PPP funding
Meanwhile, Rakesh Mohan, a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank, on Monday blamed the NPAs piles to the skewed public-private partnerships (PPPs), which have been heavily funded by banks.
In the way PPPs model, private sector cannot succeed unless either they have user charges or unless they have other ways of generating returns to finance, he said.
